That means something rather different in Korea.
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Sheesh, I bet that took whole truckloads of outfits!
I don’t know where the genre started but as far as i know Japan made one of the more famous examples with Battle Royale, which has been copied and iterated on ad nauseum.
Since the film’s release, the term “battle royale” has been redefined to refer to a fictional narrative genre and/or mode of entertainment inspired by the film, where a select group of people are instructed to kill each other off until there is a triumphant survivor.
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There is not a large presence of Japanese live action shows on US Netflix. There is a huge assortment of Korean ones.
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Here in Japan, there are quite a few live-action shows from Japan. In fact, there are more Japanese live-action shows than Korean live-action shows (though by a small margin).
However, they have very few Netflix original Japanese live-action shows, so perhaps they haven’t negotiated the rights to them overseas?
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Could be worse. You don’t speak our language? Here, have an SDH track.
Battle Royale had its own culturally unique areas to mine:
-ultra competitive youth/achievement culture
-Japan’s history of using young people as expendible weapon systems
-“We love the sensei” drama genre parodied
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That’s exactly the case.
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Well, the screenplay was clearly the result of combining a Richard Bachman story and a wheelbarrow full of coke.
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That goes without saying for anything made in the 80’s. And doubly so for anything Stephen King wrote
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All true and I love Korean cinema, but if there’s one thing I would accuse it of, it’s that opposite to Hollywood, they pretty much shoehorn in unhappy endings. Seriously, I don’t even ever get my hopes up for any characters in a Korean film, because I know they will invariably get fucked over in the most cruel and heartbreaking way imaginable.
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That’s a good point. But, damn, they make those unhappy endings work. Chaser and Barbie and Samaritan Girl in particular.
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Squid Game is one of the best aesthetic depictions of the essential situation of capitalism: it reveals the destructive social fabric that capitalism generates, especially the profound barbarism that exists in our society behind the thinnest of veneers. It is hardly surprising that the series comes from South Korea, a country that has undergone capitalist development in one of its purest, most savage versions recently.
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“A cruel war, instigated by the US…” is an ingenious way of getting round the fact that North Korea invaded South Korea.
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This SNL short about Squid Game is full of spoilers… 
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Watched it anyway… But I think that the premise was already pretty well-known?
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Yeah, I think revealing which player wins and what they do at the end are the most spoilery bits. 
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Gotcha! Thanks!
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