1st season Squid game— a South Korean dystopian-action-thriller-genre-buster that spawned a mountain of riddled corpses and became a global phenomenon — was essentially about following the rules, making a plan (risky or not), and hoping and sweating your way to survival, and then, walking away from lots and lots of money.
Now that the wildly anticipated second season has arrived (more than three years after the first season), the question is whether and how the show has applied those lessons to itself. The TV-program sea is still full of sharks: How bold can it be Squid 2 to be (or afford to be) without falling into the jaws of absurdity? (And don’t we risk this in our daily lives? But never mind.)
The series, as fans know, was initially built on a rather daring concept. Let’s refresh:
Hundreds of people saddled with insurmountable debt (well, it is not so unusual) are lured to a secret location to take part in what you might think of as Satan’s notion of musical chairs or perhaps Dante’s Potato Sack Race Hell. Contestants play elaborate, deadly versions of children’s games, with the defeated players killed by a team of armed police officers in bright pink jumpsuits. They look like hitmen hired by Barbie.
Squid game Season 2: All about the next installment of the highly anticipated Korean thriller
As the deaths pile up, the cash jackpot, which hangs above the players in a giant plastic piggy bank, grows and grows. Unfortunately, the Squid Game aims to narrow the circle down to just one survivor/winner, who then walks away with the prize. Dead losers, meanwhile, seek organs to sell on the black market. This, perhaps, is what drives Peter Marshall on the old Hollywood Squares meant when he spoke of “lovely parting gifts”.
If you happen to be a champion, it should be a glorious experience – coming out not only in one piece but fabulously rich. Goodbye forever to those Squid Game bunk beds and blood soaked floors! But then you’ll probably have a nagging sense of guilt because your good luck or happiness came at the expense of so many other lives – people who were really no better or worse than you. You might as well resent the anonymous monsters who set this game up and watch it unfold. The whole thing does Gladiator 2 look like a mahjong night.
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We now have seven episodes of the new season—and how is game going?
Jo Yu-ri and Yim Si-wan as players with a love affair.
No Ju-han/Netflix
Well, we can say that the creators of the series avoided the sharks. On the other hand, the series seems to be playing it a bit safe, which is worrying. Season 2 does not top the shocking novelty of the first season, which was made iconic by that huge mechanical girl in charge of the relentless game of red and green light. Season 2 is a solid, logical, well-written bridge—maybe more, but not much—toward what has been billed as the third and final season.
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The show, with its big but hidden agenda, is a bit like ABC’s puzzle drama lost, which had a constantly revolving narrative that was often brilliant, occasionally frustrating and, ultimately, stupid. Squid game he certainly couldn’t be called a fool—I don’t think he ever will be. Both seasons tackle a wide range of pressing social issues—wealth inequality, prejudice, capitalism, consumerism—without being heavy-handed. That’s something. But to be honest, I’m still processing those seven episodes—and I’d rather have that giant mechanical girl glare at me than spoil anything for you. So I will proceed carefully.
The main gimmick of season 2 is that player 456 (Lee Jung-jae), who walked away as the winner of season 1, abandoned his plans to fly away with his somehow ill-gotten gains. Instead, he’s determined to uncover the nefarious league that created the Squid Game, free the players, and put a stop to the entire enterprise for good (which is more Spartacus of GladiatorI assume). He manages to return to the game as a re-player, subjecting himself to its mind-numbing, possibly (probably) fatal torture all over again.
At first, the other players recognize and accept him as a celebrity and savior: he knows the rules of every game, right? So he can prepare them! And it does, helping them dodge bullets during the first game of Red Light, Green Light. After that, however, the menu of escapades changes completely – even 456, for all his moral integrity, seems panicked. If you listen closely, you might even hear his knees knocking.
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Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun in Season 2 of Squid Game.
No Ju-han/Netflix © 2024
Emmy winner Jung-jae is excellent as this hero, whose wits are constantly scrambled as he faces or, sometimes, avoids the latest crisis.
The games, however, have become less important than the players and their pitiful, occasionally murderous, occasionally kind interactions. The characters that stand out, in terms of behavior and psychology, are Player 149 (Kang Ae-sim,), a lively and sentimental old woman devoted to her not always reliable son, Player 007 (Yang Dong-geun). (She looks roughly like John C. Reilly’s Dr. Steve Brule, which should tell you all you need to know.) There’s also the pregnant, endlessly vulnerable Player 222 (Jo Yu-ri) and Player 044 (Chae Gook-hee), who he can be a mystical shaman or just an irrational, slippery madman who sows trouble and doubt.
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None of this let’s-mix-it-with-the-characters-suffering is terribly original – it’s familiar enough to anyone who’s seen their share of disaster movies. You can imagine there might even be room for Shelley Winters from Poseidon’s Adventure, a boring woman who is nevertheless willing to sacrifice herself.
But the acting here, in any case, is uniformly good and believable, and adds to the tense question of whether a character who happens to be in possession of a metal fork with sharp teeth chooses to use it as an accessory or a weapon.
However, the season faces a fresh complication: as reported elsewhere, this time the surviving players are allowed to vote at the end of each game, declaring whether to stay for another gruesome round (pigs are getting harder with currency) or go home, splitting gain. This is a good lesson in democracy, financial planning and irrational exuberance, but it slows down the drama. It’s as if someone repeatedly inserted footage of voting booth queues into an action movie. And all that voting, ultimately, changes the direction of the narrative in ways I’d rather not reveal.
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There is still more than enough chaos in the brightly colored complex, which sometimes looks like a LEGO castle, but is also much more conventional.
Episode 6, at least, features a game so spectacularly hair-raising that it almost justified the entire season. To say anything else counts as a spoiler, according to Netflix. But it is brilliantly shot and choreographed, with an almost farcical element of door-slamming madness. Scream!Squid game season 2 is currently streaming on Netflix.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education