Children’s games can be super easy and fun to play. Here’s one, for instance, the Red Light, Green Light game. Red light, green light is a children’s game in which one person tells those behind them to run (green light) or stay still (red light), and those who move during the red light phase are eliminated.
But what if, this game has its own twist? Something we can’t foresee. Something…..DEADLY!
Picture: Jurnal Garut
Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is broke and owes a lot of money. Gi-Hun is in trouble because of his bank obligations and his chronic gambling addiction. His mother is sick and needs surgery, he’s being pursued by menacing debt collectors, and he can’t even buy his small daughter a nice birthday present.
Gi-Hun comes into a strange well-dressed man at the railway station after visiting his daughter for her birthday, who presents him a card with a circle, triangle, and square on it. The man advises him to phone the number on the back of the card if he wants to play a game for money. Gi-Hun dials the phone, desperate and fearful of losing contact with his daughter. He’s in such a financial bind that he accepts a mysterious stranger’s offer to play basic children’s games for money. What could possibly go wrong?
A dark van piloted by a masked guard arrives shortly after, and Gi-Hun climbs into the backseat before losing consciousness. n When Gi-Hun wakes up, he finds himself in a room with hundreds of other disoriented people, all dressed in green tracksuits.
As it turns out, quite a bit. Gi-hun and 455 other consenting volunteers, all of whom are poor, are sedated and taken to a building with masked guards and frightening pastel playrooms and soon realize they are contestants in the “squid game,” a competition featuring a series of traditional South Korean children’s activities with a prize pool of $45.6 billion (AUD $53 million).
The game’s rules are clear: lose and die, or win and collect 45.6 billion. Despite the fact that the odds are stacked against them, the players’ lives outside of the games are in such chaos that sacrificing their lives is the only way to solve their numerous issues.
Picture: Showbiz Cheat Sheet
I love how the games themselves are as vicious as you’d anticipate; the fact that they’re usually played by kids adds another layer of terror to an already stressful situation. Squid Game, on the other hand, keeps the tension between its horrific set pieces by focusing on the players’ relationships: alliances, rivalries, and even treachery. A particularly distressing storyline involves police officer Hwang Jun-ho infiltrating the games’ guardians in pursuit of his lost sibling.
This is a must-watch for those who love the thriller and action genres. Squid Game is a stylish, riveting film with a fantastic ensemble cast that will have you clicking play no matter how afraid you get.
Interestingly, here are some facts you should know about Squid Game:
1. Director Hwang began writing the script in 2008
Picture: Han Cinema
Director Hwang Dong-huk revealed during the Squid Game press conference that he first developed the script in 2008. Director Hwang, like the 456 participants in Squid Game, was in debt in 2008. “If there had been a game like this, I would have played it,” he said. Squid Game’s script was finished in 2009. However, attracting funders and actors was tough because the genre and plot of Squid Game were considered violent and unorthodox 12 years ago.
2. The brightly coloured uniforms represent conformity.
Picture: The Smart Local
Two iconic colours of the Squid Game is green and hot pink. The participants wear green gym clothes, while the soldiers don hot pink uniforms. The participants were dressed in green workout clothing, which Director Hwang said reminded him of what Korean high school students wore when he was a kid. The soldiers were outfitted in hot pink, which is the colour opposite of green on the colour wheel, to create a great colour contrast. The end product is not only intriguing, but it also graphically depicts the two groups as rivals.
3. The shapes on the mask are inspired by the ant colony
Picture: The Smart Local
In an ant colony, ants follow a framework that precisely defines their responsibilities and tasks. However, most of the ants appear to be indistinguishable from one another from the outside. When it came to designing the troops’ outfits, Director Hwang was inspired by this. Workers are represented by the circle, warriors by the triangle, and management by the square. Workers, troops, and managers in Squid Game are only responsible for doing their assigned responsibilities. They’d be killed if they weren’t shot.
4. The stairs were inspired by Escher’s relativity
Picture: The Smart Local
A top-down picture of the colourful, perplexing stairways attracted viewers and created an unpleasant atmosphere in episode one. Director Hwang claimed that a lithograph print by Dutch artist M.C. Escher inspired him. The lithograph print, titled Relativity, depicts a world in which the rules of gravity are not the same as they are in reality. There are a total of seven stairways in Relativity, all of which are positioned in a perplexing fashion. This is akin to Squid Game’s intricate stairway architecture and maze-like passages.
5. 456 people really participated in the first game
Picture: The Smart Local
At the start of the Squid Game, there were a total of 456 players. Real performers, not CGI, were used to portray the players.
Director Hwang was adamant about using as little CG as possible, therefore the majority of the sets were created and built-in real life. When Lee Jung-jae, the veteran actor who played Gi-hun in Squid Game, saw how large-scale the sets were in real life, he was taken aback. Director Hwang ensured that the drama was depicted in the most realistic manner possible by erecting massive sets and filming with actual people. The actors were able to engage with the physical sets and deliver a genuine performance.
Sources: The Smart Local, Mamamia, Mashable
