Squid Game: The Challenge, Netflix, review: reality remake loses none of the tension or intrigue
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Another week, another filthy rich elimination contest. After 007: Road to a Million, which franchises James Bond as a game played for a million quid, here comes Squid Game: The Challenge (Netflix). The cult South Korean drama, being all about a deadly gameshow, is clearly a more logical candidate for this form of reboot. It’s but a small step to replace characters with civilians and, rather than kill them off, boot them off.
The final pot is $4.56 million, or $10,000 per player. Every time a fresh game is played, and yet more people are eliminated, fat wads of it tumble – to drools and gasps – into the glass boule suspended over the contestants’ vast dormitory.
This and other elements of the drama have been impressively reproduced – Wendy house décor, orchestral hits, contestants’ green numbered tracksuits, the guards’ Cyclopian fencing masks. Whereas in the drama the children’s game aesthetic feels sinister, here it’s infantilising. Contestants happily fall in with the silliness. At the moment of elimination from a game, a black splat blooms on their chest and they tumble over like nursery kids play-acting at soldiers. After one game the gleaming floor looks like a playground Passchendaele.
The sadism structured into the concept – rewarding and/or punishing self-interest, sowing division, testing alliances – keeps things a-simmer. The downside of a fiction-to-factual reboot is the absence of scriptwriters. If you had a dollar every time some fist-pumping bro or earnest sister shouts “we got this” or “I love you”, you’d be halfway to 10K.
The edit seeks out the more overt personalities, the puffed-up braggart or the beta-male brimming with tears or even, after one psychological scuffle, vomit. Not that it pays to be too interesting. Those seeking the limelight become tall poppies ripe for lopping. The camera can’t notice everyone and some progress surprisingly far without once catching the eye.
Most are Americans of all stripes, with a smattering of other nationalities. The first to be evicted by others is a blameless Scouser. Another Brit applies her gaming skills to be an absolute ninja at Battleships. Contestants know the drama and understand its grammar, though that can wrongfoot them. A bunch of beefcakes hastily team up for what they assume will be tug of war, only to become neutered pawns in a contest of wits.
The drama is a savage critique of capitalism’s iniquities. With its grotesquely large prize, this Squid Game is comfortable endorsing greed. It leaves a sour taste, to palliate which there are cutaways to interviews with contestants revealing difficult back stories, if never as remorselessly blighted as in the drama.
With money at stake, rather than life itself, some of the cooped-up politicking in the middle episodes smacks wearily of Big Brother. Other passages of play lean too heavily on popularity contests. But by the final few episodes the tension, intrigue and antagonism are bubbling to the boil. I’ve seen eight of the ten episodes and am agog to discover how ruthless the last dollar-driven survivors can be.
Squid Game: The Challenge is on Netflix from Wednesday 22 November
