Review of The Host (2006) by Nick O — 23 Jan 2010

The problem in assuming a movie like The Host is an homage to cheesy Japanese monster flicks is that we don't know if the director set out to make anything like that. They could have thought that their movie was the scariest and most sincere horror ever to grace the silver screen. If that's what director Joon-ho Bong thought The Host was, maybe she needs to go back to film school.

I enjoyed The Host. Not as much as a lot of other people, although I didn't all-out hate it. I got to say the first act was dreadful. The animation on the monster was C-level at best, but then again it all goes back to whatever Bong aimed for the movie to be. The Host is a decent-enough spoof of old monster movies like Godzilla and Gamera, and focusing only on doing that, this could have been pretty cool. But it suffers from too many subplots and crises than the two-hour run time can handle.

Where The Host really fails, though, is establishing relationships between the main characters. The movie is told through the POV of Gang-Du, the father of the monster's prisoner Hyun-Seo. It completely writes off the other three members of the family.

That being said, The Host leads up to a rather stellar third act. Shot by Hyung-ku Kim, it submerges the already great South Korean landscape into an off-beat fight scene between monster and man. The Host will make fanboys (and critics) go crazy, but for me, I found it to be overstuffed with messages of peace, politics and family. The Host is fun, but it's nothing we haven't seen before.