Just wrapped up Squid Game. Pitch Meeting gets it right. Spoilers
Posted by
Mop (aka rburriel)
Oct 23 '21, 00:50
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Usually Pitch Meeting only serves to upset me by pointing out things I hadn’t noticed about movies I thought I had liked. In this case, I saw all the same flaws in Squid Game they pointed out.
At it’s core, Squid Game works. The game is intense, it’s dramatic, it’s poignant, it’s painful, it’s horrific. A lot of the window dressing is terrible and borders on ruining the whole series. Chiefly, the VIPs. You could have cut all of that and the story wouldn’t have changed one iota. Which makes it feel like it was just padding used to extend the duration of the series.
Jun-ho’s undercover sojourn also doesn’t fly with me. In a world where everything is so regimented, where the workers don’t even speak to each other, how he manages to get away with infiltrating the game is implausible.
But I also find the regimented operation implausible. These people have more precision and discipline that the Marine Corps. But then they still manage to pull off an organ stealing operation. I don’t know how they can pull off the former, but if they do, then the latter cannot be. And how do they manage to keep this operation going for years without being exposed? But also no women? I ask this because the bathroom protocol isn’t at all clear to me. At first you can’t go to the bathroom, but then they concede and let them go? Seems the original stance was stupid (although maybe designed to sow discontent, yet they won’t let the woman just pee in the middle of the dorm, so why prohibit bathroom visits in the first place if you’re just going to change your mind?) Later, they can just go to the bathroom whenever to have sex. If they had women guards, they could have guards inside the bathrooms for both men and women (or, fuck it, why abide by social norms now - why don’t they have guards - or cameras - INSIDE the bathrooms?)
I also expected the players to fight back more. The tug of war game was one place where the guards were vastly outnumber and only a handful of players could have pushed all the guards to their deaths.
But then some things that could have ruined the series, I can explain away. How is it that In-Ho, the 2015 winner and the Black Mask, lives in a tiny apartment and then just up and leaves without paying his rent? I see him the same as Gi-hun. After winning, he’s aimless and drifts (for five years) until he’s recruited to return to Squid Game as the game master.
Gi-hun doesn’t get on the airplane? He doesn’t have a goal. He doesn’t know how he’s going to find the game organizers or where they’re picking up players. Surely he could have gotten on the plane, flown to see his daughter, then returned, and worked out a plan, no? But he’s still the same flawed person he’s always been, feeding his gambling addiction. But now, instead of horse racing, he’s chasing the game. It’s the same character flaw that takes him away from his mother only to return to find her dead.
And isn’t it convenient that they ended up with exactly 3 players at the end of the glass bridge so they could be seated at the triangular table appropriately? Meh… if they had more players, they have used the square table or the circular table, so long as they all knife each other in the dorms later and are left with only 2 players to play Squid Game.
So… yeah. Not my kind of show, but I’m glad I watched it so I could be part of the zeitgeist.
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