MrBeast And Amazon Prime’s Beast Games Feels Weirdly Bland

nine months later Hype, disputeand hype controversyMrBeast and Amazon beast games has begun, with the first two episodes of ten being added to Amazon Prime today. this Deal reportedly worth $100 million To keep the world’s most popular YouTubers safe, we’ve created a game show that combines squid game with, uh, Squid Game: Challenge 1,000 players will compete for “the largest prize in entertainment history” of $5 million.

Are you okay? It’s not good, it’s annoying, and crazily derivative, but most importantly – despite its actual size – it feels small.

Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson is very good at what he does, no matter how little you know about what he does. After years of competing with Indian music channel T-Series, Donaldson’s YouTube channel is now not only the service’s most subscribed channel, but ahead of more than 50 million people. It has 337 million subscribers, a number greater than the current population of the United States. His brilliance has never been in providing unmissable entertainment, but in applying algorithms like a pro. The result is a remarkable combination of ruthless cynicism and broadly appealing, unchallenging… stuff. It might be Donaldson and a small group of his friends visiting the world’s most expensive hotels, or challenging 100 people to stand in a red circle, or giving away cars to strangers, but its artificially crude editing belies maximizing “engagement” Degree of meticulous craftsmanship.

All in all, you can hate him, his videos, his offensive commercialism, his tricking kids into thinking the solution to a massive environmental crisis is to perform nihilistic shows, his stupid side-parting, etc. – none of it changes The fact that he’s very, very good at it.

what makes this beast games‘The strange flatness is so strange. It’s a formula that matches that of many of his recent films, ever since the phenomenal success of Plagiarism without permission squid game——Competitive activities are often held: “Every country on earth fights for $250,000”, “Survive in a nuclear bunker for 100 days and win $500,000”, “100 children and 100 adults compete for $500,000” “. Considering the scale and time of the shoot, each film is extremely brief, measuring 18 minutes, 15 minutes and 17 minutes respectively. It’s a relentless, exhausting form of viewing designed to capture the viewer’s attention throughout, with ads not interrupting the viewing but breathlessly crammed into the relentless footage, like a tennis ball machine shooting images in rapid succession into your face.

beast gamesOn the other hand, it feels like a reality show competition. not one OK Reality TV competition. Not something visually beautiful and beautifully edited, e.g. survivoror something that requires the audience to invest their energy in solving the central mystery, e.g. molebut just a few incidents happening one after another while Donaldson yells endlessly about how much money they donated. Despite the ridiculous cost, it looks surprisingly cheap, like something shot in the back lot of a studio.

Oh, it’s so blatantly from squid game Just weird. Of course, the comparison is inevitable since Netflix adapted the Korean drama into a Made in America reality show (albeit without murdering its contestants), but why on earth would Amazon have anonymous stagehands don hooded suits? What about wearing a mask with a badge on it? Why deliberately force this connection? Not to mention having contestants sleep in rows of bunk beds, all wearing costumes with numbers written on their chests and backs. But looks like a very cheap version. It’s like trolling, but where beast games Be a victim of your own trolls.

like many 2000s game shows weakest link, beast games Relying heavily on forcing people or groups of people to make selfish decisions, the idea here is to start with an initial 1,000 people and as the numbers dwindle. And, to be fair, these are often interesting dilemmas. In the first episode, 1,000 contestants stood on 1,000 podiums in a huge studio, and some CG tricks gave the impression of a huge gap between them (as it turns out, yes The gap between them is so wide that when the eliminated player falls through the trap door on the podium, they could end up in a pit of sponges – watch this happen to a hundred people, and before the last one The moment after that I fell down, how incredible it was). Donaldson then pulls out the “bribe”, his iconic briefcase filled with $10,000, and if anyone chooses to eliminate themselves from the game in exchange for the money, their entire team will be eliminated as well.

The same formula was beaten to death in the first two episodes released today, though it’s compelling once again. Mainly because you can scream at the TV, “It would be irresponsible not to take the money!” and then discuss among yourself how to make sure that $100,000 now is the right and maybe even moral choice, while it’s happening multiple times There’s only a one in a thousand chance of winning $5 million after unpredictable events, and you already know that these events are more likely to result in you being eliminated based on the actions of others than your own failures.

However, in the second episode’s cliffhanger, you’ll see jaw-dropping stupidity in an enlarged version of the above. “How could I betray these people who I’ve loved like family for the past three hours for a pittance of life-changing money?” these ridiculous people think, when the alternative is… to keep playing the game and try to beat them to win the money , so they won’t win.

There are other weird things, like when you see the giant Feastables banner in the “city” they built for the event, and as if $100 million wasn’t enough, Donaldson didn’t ask for product placement. (Lunch is completely non-existent.) Or indeed the existence of that “city”, a few buildings and some pretend sidewalks and lawns, where the contestants spend a completely unexplained and unshown 24 hours between episodes. (The first episode ends with the 24-hour timer on the big screen, and the second episode starts with the timer ticking to 0. Huh?)

but among all these squid game Antics and simulated moral dilemmas, there’s something completely missing: any sense that this is Mr. Beast.

Donaldson wasn’t one of the greatest TV hosts in life, but he wasn’t incompetent either. He delivers his lines (although his lines are a combination of live and ADR), though it’s fair to observe that whenever he directly interacts with a contestant, he reacts like a bewildered creature on an alien planet scientists, but so are most TV game show hosts. But the result of this is that he comes across as more like most other game show hosts than MrBeast.

The team also includes his YouTube regulars, including Karl Jacobs, Nolan Hansen, Tareq Salameh and Chandler Hallow. Ava Kris Tyson was noticeably absent as she was in the middle of a series of events that proved to be. false accusation During filming, he appeared to no longer be part of the crew. But again, their character on YouTube is to run around screaming and acting like a kid, which is extremely annoying for adults but an absolute joy for kids. Here, it seems like they’re going to commentate on the scene, but everyone probably gets two lines in both episodes. Carl, who I have a deep hatred for because of his unacceptable bloody laughter that I constantly hear on my son’s tablet, delivers the best lines in the entire thing (when the contestant comes out from When he fell off the podium, he noted, “The fall was only scary for the first two minutes.”), but was otherwise muted.

The editing feels like television. The camerawork feels like television. The demos, the events, the mandatory confessionals with individual players, it’s all just TV. Television presented by low-scale characters, low-scale production. This should be something else! This should be the terrifying energy of YouTube!

This may seem like an odd complaint since this show doesn’t feel exciting enough, but if it is no What does MrBeast offer, and what is the purpose of it all? It will definitely attract an audience because of the name, but I don’t believe it will retain it. Especially now that the show is released weekly, that’s not how kids watch it anything.

It’s worth noting that alongside the show’s launch, the MrBeast YouTube channel also uploaded a 24-minute video showing his low-fidelity method of reducing the number of players at the start of the show from 2,000 to 1,000. It’s designed as a portal, with YouTube videos ending just as Prime shows begin, imploring viewers to skip ahead and enjoy the first episode for free. And, just like a thousand online media outlets shamelessly promoting the program when they “cover” it today, you should opt for the 30-day free trial to continue.

I think this will work in the beginning, but I also think that silly, cluttered YouTube videos are more entertaining for the target audience than bland, neat, flat Amazon shows. (It also doesn’t hide the fact that some people get bored and just walk away during filming, and shows how easily people get hurt During the crazy events.

so, beast gamesDespite the large number of players, the size of the arena, and the huge amount of prize money, it feels so small. It feels trivial, unimportant, and mundane.

I start by observing how great Donaldson is at what he does, no matter how serious a problem I personally think it is. (My son loves and believes in his plaster charity, and I struggle between letting him like something and sometimes feeling the need to say he’s doing it harm.) beast games That’s not what Donaldson is good at, which is really weird. The result is… okay? Small, unimportant, but nice. Just not the way it could or should have been, no matter how much I didn’t want to see it.

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