Critic Reviews
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You’re better off watching Squid Game again than watching the cynical, depressing mess that is Squid Game: The Challenge.
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It gets rid of the messy murder business — sort of — along with most of the uncomfortable ideas. What’s left is a beautifully designed but empty game box, a creepy dystopia cosplay, an answer to the question of what happens when you take a darkly pointed TV satire and remove its brains.
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The Challenge builds on the most superficial aspects of Squid Game while ditching — or, really, undermining — the most profound.
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In pretending that the stakes are much higher than they actually are, the entire enterprise feels trivialized.
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The betrayals the game forces them to enact, and the elimination of players with fake black blood and playacting death, leads to severe, sometimes unhinged outbursts that are icky and intrusive to witness. These people are hurting in the artificial environment, and I can’t even remember their names, just the numbers emblazoned on their chests.
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The central themes of Squid Game – the futility of social mobility, how we assess life in terms of monetary value – are completely lost among the bitching, backstabbing and gameplans. Perhaps I’m being a miser, maybe I should just give in to the fun of it all. But Squid Game: The Challenge left me feeling empty and grubby.
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Although it gestures at some of the more complicated questions lurking beneath its existence, this is merely lip service without any real care or substance. All the gimmicks it throws in at the margins can't hide how morally bankrupt it is at its core. When we look back on the rise of streaming, Squid Game: The Challenge will be the show that saw the fires of hell and decided to find an even more craven low.