Squid Game 2: 'snatching' back the lost aura, Pachinko 2 lost with 2 words?

News1 reported that Netflix's hit series " Squid Game 2" won the Best Foreign Drama Award at the 30th Critics Choice Awards, which took place on February 7 in California, USA (local time).

Netflix's production competed with top contenders such as "Pachinko 2" and "Citadel: Honey Bunny" for the win. This recognition cements "Squid Game 2's" status as a global phenomenon and an important achievement in the history of streaming films.

Released in December 2024, "Squid Game 2" follows male protagonist Gi Hoon (Lee Jung Jae) returning to the deadly game again to learn about the forces behind it, especially the mysterious man The Front Man (Lee Byung Hun).

The series dominated Netflix's global ratings for weeks, reaching more than 1.5 billion cumulative views in the first 3 weeks and becoming one of the platform's top sequels.

Previously, the first season of "Squid Game" released in 2021 also won the same category at the 27th Critics Choice Awards, and Lee Jung Jae won the Best Actor award in a TV series.

"Squid Game 3" will be released on June 27, 2025. Meanwhile, the Critics Choice Awards is a prestigious film award, held since 1995, by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, consisting of critics from nearly 200 television and radio stations in the United States and Canada.

This year, Critics Choice named "Anora" the best movie. Adrien Brody ("The Brutalist") and Demi Moore ("Substance") won Best Actor/Actress in a Motion Picture.

In the TV segment, "Shogun" won 4 awards, including Best Drama Series and Acting Awards for Hiroyuki Sanada (Best Actor - Drama Series), Tadanobu Asano (Best Supporting Actor - Drama Series) and Moeka Hoshi (Best Supporting Actress - Drama Series).

To achieve its current achievements, Squid Game 2 at the time of its launch was poorly reviewed. It took up to two episodes out of a total of seven episodes of season 2 of Squid Game for the story to bring the characters to the main line. In the meantime, the film fell into repeating the insults of the male lead Gi Hun (played by Lee Jung Jae) to the bloody person who considers Squid Game as a pastime, wasting time on unimportant characters.

When Gi Hun returns to the familiar green tracksuit, the audience meets new players, but unfortunately, the plot is too similar to the first season: play, kill, rage, and then repeat.

The scary giant doll Young Hee is back with the game "Red Light, Green Light" is merely to please fans. Despite the addition of new games, the colorful settings such as sweet candies and haunting childish melodies still do not bring a different feeling from what the audience witnessed in the previous season.

When the games begin, Detective Hwang Jun Ho's quest to find a place to host the survival game is pushed aside. The ending in the last episode is too hasty, making the already fragmented season even more unfinished.

"A film that is over-communicated, the shell is colorful but the content is empty", "Bad, it's annoying to watch. The main character plans in an indescribably stupid way", "The movie should have ended in part 1"... The audience gave a harsh assessment.

The half-hearted ending for the film to continue to drag on to the new part, airing in the second half of 2025, but only making the audience more bored because there is no element of surprise. Compared to the survival film series that has become a Japanese brand, Squid Game is clearly far behind in terms of logical content and character line deployment.

The highlight of this season lies in the appearance of more female characters built with more depth, from a pregnant player to a self-proclaimed mage.

Squid Game 2 unexpectedly lost miserably to a rookie, part 3 needs to be reconsidered? Hoàng Phúc06:53:18 21/02/2025Following the success of season 1, Squid Game 2 continues to break many records, again topping the charts of the most watched non-English TV show on Netflix globally.