The Hunger Games: Catching Bullets
In a world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, how does one break out of the cycle? When presented with a chance to win a pot of cash through playing games, who wouldn’t take it? The only thing is, these games are deadly. Even with this stipulation and an option to back out, nothing will change if you go back, so why not keep going? Who’s going to come out with all the cash? Let’s find out in our review of Squid Games.
***Warning: Spoilers***
The Battle Royale genre isn’t new, but this entry feels a bit different. We have the structure of rich people making poor people dance around death for entertainment, but we get more than previous entries. It feels like a variant of The Hunger Games. People are initially tricked into joining, but are given democratic opportunities to leave. It’s interesting to see the many different situations that ultimately draw contestants back in.
The activities that they participate in are unique. They essentially take traditional Korean games and turn them into blood baths. Each game is expanded to a grand scale. We’ve got the now-iconic giant robot girl, giant jungle gym, and more. Waiting to see what sick game was next was always a rush, even if jumping on panes of glass might not have been a child game, at least I’ve never seen them played on variety shows.
From the games, to the facilities and all those who inhabit it, this show was visually striking. When we start going down the rabbit hole, pops of color begin to inhabit these bleak environments. It gives a big contrast to what’s going on, but plays into the motif of the childrens games. The budget seems high and it reflects in these grand sets. I’ve seen some behind the scenes and they built most of the sets, apart from some obvious CG necessities. It really helped immerse us in, as the CG blends well with the practical environments.
The most interesting part of this series was the characters. Contestants could have technically played fair, but with different archetypes filling out the roster, anything within the rules was fair game. Although we don’t follow all 456 of them directly, we get a good amount of character development for the handful of ones that we do. A screw-up of a father, a North-Korean refugee, a foreigner that wants to support his family, and an older gentleman who just wants to have fun, just to name a few. Getting a closer look at everyone’s motivations lead us to rooting for any given one. Some stories were stronger than others, but we were given enough variety to choose your favorites. When major story beats came, it made it all the tougher when certain eliminations happened. I'm looking at you, episodes 6 and 8.
There was captivating writing, but some felt like they fell to the wayside. I feel like some of these happened because they were leaving it open for a follow up season or two. The big one for this was the Investigator’s story. All we know is that he was looking for his brother, but we don’t know why he became the Frontman or his motivation for what happened at the end. Gihun felt like we only truly followed him at the beginning and end, and then again, his story didn’t really finish either. Number 001’s last minute story felt like it came out of nowhere and needed some more setup. We were following the quest for the cash prize throughout the series, and then this story of finding the good in people just popped up out of the blue. I guess we’ll have to wait for the more-than-probable follow up.
As of the publishing of this review, the show is skyrocketing in popularity and is certainly all the buzz at the watercooler. This put more development into a long past genre, and imagined it in a grand scale. Ultimately, the development proved too much to give each main character an equal footing. I look forward to what they could do in future installments and hopefully, they’ll give us more time to marinade between releases.