Review of The Host (2013) by Leon B — 04 Aug 2013

Laughably bad movie, terrible script, and bad performances from people having to spout such horrible dialogue. Saoirse Ronan is a good actress (at least in other things); here she is mostly terrible. She is either out of her range, given bad or no direction, and/or the best actress in the world can't pull off such a generically written character.

I'm mostly going with the latter two options. Ronan really needed a better dialect coach, or someone to watch her performance more closely from scene to scene because her southern accent used to differentiate Melanie from Wanderer (stupidest name ever, btw, as even some of the characters mention) cuts in only one out of every 30 words, and there are entire stretches where (as Melanie) she forgets to be doing the accent.

It doesn't help her decision was to make both characters whisper a lot in their speech patterns. Since both characters are utterly bland, it makes it even more difficult for Ronan (but unintentionally hilarious, especially with the dialogue given to her).

I don't think it's Ronan's fault - I don't think any actress could have salvaged this pile of shit. The premise of the movie could have been interesting; but the movie fails to take it anywhere of worth.

And having the least threatening, most sleep-inducing hostile/invasive alien race of all time in your movie doesn't help things either. Oh also the "love triangle" is one of the worst I've seen (worse than "Pearl Harbor?"), and it's pretty funny all of the young male leads in this movie are utterly indistinguishable from each other; each one is distinguishably bland in a way, at least.