Movie review: The Host

The Host is the latest movie based on a Stephanie Meyer book (the first 17 were Twilight films).

I should probably explain the book first:

In case there’s anyone out there who hasn’t read The Host (if one can imagine such a deprived, literature-starved soul), it’s about a future in which aliens have conquered humanity by slowly and steadily attaching one of themselves to each human and taking control of his or her brain. The aliens live in perfect peace and harmony with each other, but their presence in a body obliterates the mind of the human whose body they have taken.

So obviously there’s a complex moral dilemma there regarding the balance of obtaining utopia against the loss of free will, and there’s the drama of watching the last days of the catastrophic end of the human race, all of which is basically ignored for the sake of watching one girl try to choose between two guys. Except that in this case there’s a real twist – the one girl is actually two girls: both Wanderer, the alien who has been inserted into a human body, and Melanie, the human girl whose body it is, and whose mind has not been erased by the insertion because she’s special.

So there’s like a love triangle… quadrangle?... between Melanie, her boyfriend Jared, Wanderer, who loves Jared because Melanie does, but also likes Ian, and Ian, who suddenly decides he’s in love with Wanderer after trying to kill her earlier in the book, because something something.

In the end everyone gets what they wanted (“everyone” meaning the cute teen leads. Not the rest of humanity, which is still more or less screwed). This is a Stephanie Meyer story, after all, not Margaret Atwood.

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Obviously, it’s hard for a movie to do a story like that justice. But I have to say, the The Host movie was even better than I expected.

The movie was clearly influenced by the Twilight movies, in that all emotions are expressed through staring, and only through staring. I think the script for the whole film was probably three pages long.

But it’s not like staring and sporadic stilted dialog is all that happens – the human characters are, after all, fighting for their lives. So we also have the thrill of watching them do critical, life-and-death tasks like harvesting wheat and driving trucks.

It turns out real survival isn't very interesting.

Fortunately, this movie, while inspired by Twilight, improved on the Twilight films in two major ways:

1.      Instead of taking away perfectly good action scenes like the Twilight movies did (werewolves fighting vampires had so much potential), The Host adds in action scenes that never existed in the book. (It does this primarily by making the characters mouth-breathingly stupid enough to drive right in and out of their super-secret hideout in broad daylight, leading to a couple of car chase scenes. If you can call a scene with three minutes of stares and ten seconds of driving a car chase.)

2.      The Twilight series' actors struggled, to put it mildly, to portray the passionate emotions they were supposed to be feeling. 

In The Host, many characters have been hijacked by peaceable alien beings with no strong emotions – meaning the actors’ abilities are right in line with what the script demands from them.

But the movie had a few flaws, some minor and one major.

The minor: while the movie took care to help viewers keep Wanderer apart from Melanie by giving the latter a thick southern accent, no similar care was taken to help viewers tell the virtually identical, generically handsome male leads apart. Technically, the two of them weren’t played by the same actor, like Melanie/Wanderer was (or so the credits would have you believe) – but it still got confusing (wait - is that guy kissing her the one who tried to strangle her, or the one who wanted to shoot her? Because one of those two things is totally normal, but the other would just be weird).

The major: they skipped the best line in the book! (Note to Snan: I got this line a little wrong before).

How can you have a four-way alien/ human victim/ boyfriend/ other human love… thing… without the following line: “No. I – I love you too. Me, the little silver worm in the back of her head”?? (that’s a real line from the book, for the record).

Also missing (another real line): “I held you in my hand, Wanderer. And you were so beautiful.”

My overall rating:

If watched alone or with normal people: 2 out of 5 stars.

If watched with Snan and her cool friend Whitney: ALL OF THE STARS.