By Ben Helme
This review is essentially a series of spoilers in a trench coat, pretending to be an article.
It gives away major plot points from across all nine episodes.
My Instagram explore page has been overrun with attempts at the dalgona candy challenge and fan-art of the characters. This Halloween, when every party is dominated by green tracksuits and red jumpsuits, we’ll see its cultural stranglehold on full display.
Squid Game’s a phenomenon.
But it isn’t very good.
It’s impressively shot and competently acted by the leads. The message, of the exploitative and damaging impacts of late-stage capitalism, comes across clearly. Most creditably, the first game, “Red Light, Green Light”, is a highly successful set-piece, dripping with suspense. That I’ll remember as excellent.
Beyond that, there’s little to recommend the show, except a vague, overarching watchability.
There are, to my mind, eight main flaws.
Predictable Deaths
Watch the first episode, and guess which three people make it to the end. Did you get it right? Me too. Deaths can and should reduce predictability, not increase it. Look at Alien, Psycho or Game of Thrones. You don’t know who’ll make it to the end. It’s exciting. With Squid Game, you don’t just know who’ll survive to the end, but who’ll survive each individual game. Consider the tug of war. Each of the main characters, except for one, is fighting on the same team. Squid Game tries to build up the tension, but the leads clearly aren’t all about to die in episode four. They inevitably survive. Even in “Gganbu”, a far better episode, the eventual winners of the four marble games we follow are clear from the outset. Sang-Woo’s betrayal of Ali was particularly predictable. For the viewer, the surprises are small and the stakes low.
Unoriginality
Squid Game has attracted controversy for its similarity to other Korean shows. It seems particularly parallel to 2014’s As the Gods Will. Perhaps consequently, the Korean response has been more muted than the overwhelming international acclaim. I’m not saying it’s plagiarised, just that it’s concept isn’t particularly new – off the top of my head, it similarly evokes: The Hunger Games, Would you Rather and Battle Royale.
Everything doesn’t have to be original – but it’s worth noting that Squid Game’s isn’t particularly ground-breaking. It’s been lauded as a ‘must-watch’, but what does it really offer that you haven’t already seen?
Repetitive Gore
The show’s premise is about deaths in elaborate games. There are endless possibilities, and for a horror lover, this is grimly promising. As promised, a good chunk of the budget is spent on exploding heads and strawberry jam. Yes, people die. But they die by getting shot, getting stabbed, or falling off something. Call me macabre, but if a show’s whole premise is ‘crazy, gory, death games’, then I expect them to do better than ‘gun, knife, ledge’. It’s repetitive, lazy, and it wastes the opportunity to make something memorably scary.
Underdeveloped Plotlines
Do you remember that policeman? He broke into the facility and disguised himself in a red jumpsuit. He strove to seem exactly like the other helpers to avoid detection. So, we watched him wander around, giving nothing away about himself to his colleagues.
As a result, he revealed very little about himself to the viewers. He was given no depth, and despite his being billed as a lead, his inevitable death had the emotional resonance of a background character. He was also vaguely involved in the organ harvesting plotline. Whatever that was.
Gi-Hun’s backstory of having seen his friend die during a protest is another dead-end. It had the potential to be interesting but was given about 30 seconds of development. Apparently, the writers wanted the viewers to be as uninterested by their lead as they seemed to be.
The list of unresolved questions doesn’t end there. Why was the brother the frontman?
What was Mi-nyeo’s background? Why would Gi-Hun do that to his hair? (More on this one later…)
There’s a fine line between a lingering mystery and an unsatisfying loose thread.
Slow Pacing
In the show’s defence, I didn’t expect them to cancel the game in the second episode. While they were outside of it, we were treated to a deeply boring episode about their lives outside of the game. It fleshed out the characters, but it really dragged.
This isn’t unique to that episode. Pretty much any time they were outside of the games (except for the night-time fight) felt like filler. We were just shown a series of conversations that told us very little. Worse than that, they frequently didn’t even show conversations, just the milling around of the red jumpsuits. There’s only so many times you need to show masked men filter down some colourful stairs in a geometric room. We get it.
Do you really feel that you watched 486 minutes’ worth of content? Did 486 minutes’ worth of things happen? It wasn’t artistically unrushed; it was just slow.
Cringey Conversations
I don’t speak Korean, so I can’t really critique most of the dialogue. Some of it seemed stilted, but this might be the famously inaccurate subtitles muddying a well-written conversation for all I know. However, I can comment on the English language sections. They’re truly, laughably bad. A gaggle of American/European men sit around and shout about sex and death. I recently read an article titled ‘Why is Squid Game’s English-Language Acting so Bad’. In the actors’ defence, they’re saddled with dialogue such as “oh, it’s uh, such a beautiful number, 69” and “oh, you dirty dog”. I’m not sure we can expect great performances when their lines have all the poetry of a Riverdale fanfic.
Underwhelming Twist
The old man was evil! On a technical level, I think it works. There are clues to it, such as: his ability to end the fight, his missing casefile, and his knowledge of the games. So, it isn’t exactly shoehorned in. But it destroys one of the most sympathetic characters and doesn’t give us time to then get to know the evil version of him. A great character is eviscerated, and we aren’t given much in exchange. On a meta level, the fact that this revisionism comes in the final episode makes it feel like a gimmick. In the last half hour, they pull out an obligatory ‘clever’ twist. It feels forced and unnecessary.
Flimsy Symbolism
In the last episode, after the main character inevitably survives the game and we make it past the inevitable twist, there’s a final shock. Gi-Hun dyes his hair bright red and ends the series looking like a budget Sharon Osbourne. Why? Well, show-creator Hwang Dong-hyuk tells us, it’s because of the symbolic meaning. “I chose the colour and I thought it really showed his inner anger.” He’s angry, so his hair is now bright red.
Right.
Even the show’s greatest advocates seem sheepish when discussing it. It’s like if Elio had dyed his hair bright blue at the end of Call Me by Your Name to show that he’s sad. It’s jarring, obvious symbolism, delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Most of all, it replaced the ending’s potential gravity with humour. And you’re not laughing with it.
Overall, it’s a 5/10. It’s watchable but ultimately unsatisfying. It’s like eating snacks for a meal. I enjoyed myself, but next time I’ll want something more substantial.
Hi, I’m Ben. I’m from Sandwich in Kent, and I’m in my second year, studying PPE. Aside from writing, I love hiking, reading and finding hidden places in London. I also love TV and film – if you have any suggestions for something I should watch, especially anything prettily shot or spooky, I’d love to hear.
If you ever feel like discussing something I’ve writte, please message me – my emails b.m.helme@lse.ac.uk, or my Instagrams’s @benh3lme!
Ben Helme
