Friday, August 2, 2013
Everyone’s heard of Twilight, the supernatural teen romance series from author Stephenie Meyer. Well, it’s no surprise that after the success of that series, Hollywood would try to adapt another of Ms. Meyer’s works for the big screen. The Host is a novel published just after the last Twilight novel Breaking Dawn, and thankfully it’s only a stand-alone novel, not a series. So how did The Host turn out as a film? Is this a better lovestory than Twilight? Does the main character have more facial expressions than Kristen Stewart?
Allow me to address the last question first. Saoirse Ronan is a very talented actress, and casting her as the main character in The Host was almost a waste of talent, although she played the role well. You may remember Saoirse (pronounced sér-sha, like inertia) from City of Ember, The Lovely Bones, and Hanna. She will also be starring in Wes Anderson’s next work, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is going to be packed full of stars. So anyway, Saoirse is a great actress and a good choice for the role, but casting famous people, as I’ve said before, doesn’t save a movie with an atrocious plot.
Saoirse plays Melanie Stryder, one of the few remaining humans on Earth, sort of. You see, in this world extraterrestrials have landed and taken over. The actual aliens are just little white blobby things, but the species are parasites, so they implant themselves in the brains of humans and take control of their bodies and minds. The aliens have done this on twelve other planets already; they consider it a noble cause to rid a world of its evil, and humans fit that description pretty nicely. They have attempted to balance nature and prevent the human race from destroying the planet. They are all model citizens who do not commit crime or do anything dishonest, and are all nice and polite to each other. Sounds great, except that the humans who haven’t yet been taken over don’t really appreciate the effort and are essentially outlaws being hunted down by the bad guys: aliens who call themselves seekers and are very easy to spot because they wear all white and drive chrome-covered vehicles. Oh, by the way, people with aliens inside them have painfully bright blue eyes, so you can easily distinguish them.
So after jumping out a window, Melanie is captured by the seeker and becomes host to an alien named Wanderer (later shortened to Wanda). The problem is Melanie is still awake inside her head, and through the magic of voiceover we get to hear what Melanie is thinking in her sometimes Southern accent. So while Wanda argues with the voice inside her head, Melanie eventually convinces her to run away and rejoin the other free humans in their secret underground colony, which only helps lead the seekers right to them.
Here’s where things get weird as we meet a whole slew of unnecessary characters, none of whom can decide whether or not to trust Wanda, and none of whom have any idea that Melanie is still alive inside her body, because Wanda hasn’t bothered to tell any of them. Living at the colony is Melanie’s old boyfriend Jared, played by Max Irons, who is understandably bummed out by the supposed death of his girlfriend. His friend Ian, played by Jake Abel, is suddenly smitten with Wanda, even though she looks and sounds exactly like Melanie.
Now, it’s clear that Ms. Meyer likes her little love triangles; Twilight was a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf, and a blank-faced teenage girl. The Host shows us a bizarre love “quadrangle” between two boys, a girl and an alien, two of which share a single body. I can sort of understand where she was going with it, like two souls fall in love regardless of the bodies they inhabit or something like that, but in the end it’s just confusing and weird. It’s like she’s saying to her teen girl fanbase, “Hey, you think your relationship is complicated, but look at this girl. This girl is actually two people, and each of them wants a different guy.” Nice try, but it just didn’t quite work the way it was intended. It would’ve made sense if Wanda acted very differently from Melanie, but from what I saw, they were pretty much the same. Maybe I just didn’t see enough of Melanie before she got taken over, which is the film maker’s fault for not showing it to me.
Something else that annoyed me is that this movie attempts to be something more than what it actually is, with occasional car chases and gun violence, it’s like they wanted it to be a bit of an action movie, but with sci-fi and romance and drama thrown in. No, it’s too much, mashing together all these different genres just confuses the audience. If there’s action in the middle of the movie, you expect the climax to be big and actiony as well, and it wasn’t.
Speaking of the climax, although most of the movie was bad, I was surprised by the ending. It was rather unexpected, and I actually said, “Oh, wow.” I won’t give it away, because my reviews are always spoiler-free. Even though it had that little twist, the ending pretty much amounts to “they all lived happily ever after.” Lame, lame, lame. I’m sick of movies with feel-good endings that try to convince you that everything’s going to be all right. “It’s okay, the entire human race has been taken over, but it’ll all work out.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There’s not much else to say really. I could go minute by minute picking apart each and everything wrong with the movie, but it amounts to the same thing: this movie is lousy. The people who like it probably like Twilight as well, so take that for what it’s worth.
Story: 2/10
Acting: 3/10
Mise-en-scène: 4/10
Cinematography: 2/10
Soundtrack: 1/10
Score: 2.4/10
