Squid Game

It's the TV sensation of the season. At least, that's how Netflix has positioned Squid Game, the dystopian thriller from screenwriter and director Hwang Dong-hyuk that has become the most-watched Netflix original series of all time. The streaming giant only shares your data voluntarily and, in any case, has the power to put any series it wants on the landing pages of its millions of subscribers; If a normal television network had that kind of power, we would have had many more seasons of Cop Rock. But, not surprisingly, the first episode of The Squid Game is about blind trust (although this kind of trust does no one any good). Are you rewarding our confidence with a series worth watching?

The Squid Game stars Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun, a 47-year-old divorced family man, failed restaurateur, degenerate gamer, and a bag of shit. After an initial flashback in which he plays tag game with his friends as a child, we learn all the details, including the fact that he lives with his elderly mother, who steals her ATM card. to get money to bet in a betting room. Your earnings are stolen as you run away from lenders you owe money to. (They make him sign a promissory note with his own bloody fingerprint.) Since it is his daughter's birthday, he uses what little money he has left to buy her some fast food and a boxed toy from an arcade crane machine, which turns out to be a pistol-shaped lighter. So yeah, it's a bad day overall.

Chapter 1: review

Then things go from bad to worse. A mysterious man in a suit approaches him in a subway station - Gi-hun is at first convinced that he is going to try to tell him about Jesus - with an offer. If he can beat the man in a little game of skill and chance, he will win 100,000 won; if you lose, the mystery man will slap you. After countless slaps, Gi-hun wins the game and pockets the money, along with the man's business card and an offer: You can win more, much more, if you call the man and play games like this for a few days.

When he finally returns to his mother's house, she informs him of what his son refused to tell him: His daughter, mother, and stepfather are moving to the United States next year. It's the icing on a shitty cake. So he does what any desperate man would do: call the mysterious money man and accept his offer.

That's when the real weirdness begins. He is picked up by a van full of sleeping people and immediately receives a dose of sleeping gas. He wakes up in a huge bedroom wearing a numbered green tracksuit that identifies him as contestant number 456 out of a total of 456 contestants. As he and his companions wake up and attempt to discover their surroundings, they are approached by a phalanx of masked men in pink jumpsuits, who run the show under the direction of a black-masked, hooded fellow called the Figurehead.

The pink protagonist, who wears a square logo on his mask (everyone else has a circle), brings you up to speed. Everyone there, he says, suffers from crippling debt. Here they have the opportunity to earn enough money - how much is not specified - but apparently it will be enough to fill a gigantic shiny piggy bank that they come down from the ceiling, to pay off their debts and start over, provided they sign a simple consent form.

After obediently signing, they all make their way through some stairs. They come out onto a fake stage, in front of a giant robotic doll. The first game, they are told, is Red Light, Green Light. If they manage to reach the finish line without being eliminated by continuing to move after the doll finishes reciting the little sung poem from the game, they win.

The method of elimination is revealed by surprise: When you lose, you are shot dead.

Apparently, more than half of the group turns to flee in a blind panic and is gunned down. The others frantically rush to the finish line, fervently hoping they freeze enough not to trigger the dummy's motion detector after each round. Survivors include our hero, Gi-hun, number 456; his old friend Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), number 218, whose successful exterior hides a millionaire debt; 067 (Jung Ho-Yeon), a North Korean defector who, coincidentally or not, is the woman who stole Gi-hun's pocket; 001 (O Yeong-su), who has a brain tumor that threatens to cause dementia; 101 (Heo Sung-tae), a gangster who served as a mentor to 067 before he allegedly betrayed him; and 199 (Anupam Tripathi), a South Asian man and apparently the only non-Korean in the game, who saves Gi-hun's life by holding him by his jacket when he nearly trips after he is supposed to have stopped moving.

When the game finally ends and all the survivors have crossed the finish line, a huge artificial ceiling closes over the playing field, sealing everyone inside. All of this happens under the watchful eye of the Figurehead, who listens to a relaxing rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon" performed by a toy automaton from a miniature jazz band as he watches the crowd get dejected. (Villains and their ironic taste in music, man).

By the time the chapter ends, his background in the "lethal game competition" genre is obvious. The Hunger Games' use of the lower classes to entertain the rich comes to mind, as does Battle Royale's exploration of the violence that underlies a placid society on the surface. But I think that the film version of The Running Man is the closest thing to what we have here since it is not about the contestants killing each other - not yet, at least - but it is the architect of the game. that is charged to the players.