Was bored, watched the first episode of
Squid Game on Netflix.
In the accidental competition between this and Alice in Borderland, the latter is more complex and cerebral, with more complicated/intersecting plot lines. Squid Game seems to be more straight-forward and brutal in its challenges.
The plusses of Squid Game -- it's actually kind of funny, is the most obvious one. I laughed at a number of things throughout the hour-long pilot, mostly character-driven moments. The hero is kind of a lovable doofus, one that we've seen before (divorced dad clumsily interacting with his only child, kind of a deadbeat loser who can't get his life together, but generally well-intentioned and partly a victim of poor luck), so it doesn't break ground in that way, but it's still amusing. The other strength is that in the episode there's 2-3 sequences of decent editing (video and sound) that remind me a bit of unexpected choices from Breaking Bad montages, for example, though not QUITE as polished. Still, it elevates the show a bit, it was a delightful surprise.
The negative is that it's still somewhat throwaway TV so far; once you're done, not sure how long the story will linger.
There's a positive takeaway from both shows, however -- it's encouraging to see Netflix running shows in Korean with subtitles as default (not sure if there is an English dub, I didn't check) and that they both did so well on this particular platform, which seems to have the lowest common denominator American audience. There's been more prominence of shows and films with subtitles in the last year or two.
I don't feel like I've gotten far enough to discuss class concerns yet (as per the earlier posts), right now it's just been about all the folks with money/gambling issues, without really driving home what is causing that. (the protagonist seems to have had some bad occupational luck, followed by two failed business, which then slowly spiraled into shady/risky economic practices to try and dig himself out.)
I did have fun figuring out the conversion of currency on the fly -- first figuring out what language was spoken to determine country, then common currency, then the currency exchange rate. So basically his winnings at the track in this episode were a month's cost of living minus rent. But his other debt (added together) is probably in the range of $400-500K USD. I think 100 million won is only about 85K USD, so that makes the final jackpot (minus death money) worth about 39 million USD; the money per death will obviously jack this up, considering the number playing.
On that first episode game:
