125 minutes. 2013. Rated PG-13.
Kiss me like you want to get slapped.
The Host begins post-Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Well, kind of. Unsurprisingly, the aliens have done a much better job at being human than the humans:violence is a thing of the past, the environment is back on track,
and poverty doesn’t exist–in fact, money doesn’t exist. Earth is a spotless suburban heaven populated by very polite non-people. The only hitch is the dwindling human insurgency, which objects to being mindless hosts for the parasitic aliens.
Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan) is a rebel-free human en route to a safe haven with her little brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury) and boyfriend Jared. (Max Irons) When she’s captured and implanted with an entity named Wanderer, she resists the alien’s control and forces it to take her to her friends. Along the way, Melanie and Wanderer bond and develop mutual respect. Once they arrive at the resistance, Melanie’s human friends struggle to reconcile the situation, but ultimately, they come to appreciate Wanderer–whom they dub Wanda–as much as they love Melanie. Wanda ultimately sympathizes with the humans and helps them to fight Fleur (Rachel Roberts), a psychopathic human-seeker obsessed with wiping out free will at any cost.
I was surprised to find myself liking The Host. For various reasons, I did not enjoy either Stephanie Meyer’s super-popular Twilight book series nor the film adaptations. But while I didn’t read The Host, I found both the story and the characterization of the film far more mature than those of its creative predecessors.
To begin with, Melanie and Wanda have an interesting rapport. Their relationship is dynamic and I found it plausible, especially when they began to rely on one another for survival. Saoirse Ronan isn’t exactly great, but she does an okay job with a complex part, especially considering the film’s ancestry. Since The Host was overtly marketed at the Twilight crowd, it might even have been a little odd if the acting were top-notch. While a Twilight-esque love triangle dominates the drama, Melanie and Wanda are both active characters driven by their
desire to control their lives–a far cry from Bella’s eagerness to subsume herself in Edward’s personality. In fact, Melanie’s most distinctive trait is her fiery temper. While it’s a stretch to believe that the ancient Wanda might derive something new from Mel’s passion, it’s hardly as far-fetched as, say, a 400-year-old vampire falling in love with a 16-year-old girl. At least Wanda is plausibly sheltered in the antiseptic Soul society.
The absurd spotlessness of Soul civilization was one of the most attractive and best-used concepts I have seen in film yet this year. Even at the most critical of times, Souls seem to pose their host bodies for maximum aesthetic appeal, as though they’re all living in an advertisement in an architectural magazine. The entire point of their civilization is basically tourism–they just want to experience the beauty of alien worlds from a safely sterilized
alien perspective, and the thoughtless destruction of native civilizations is barely worth consideration. They don’t value sentience, and in fact, for such nominally advanced beings, the Souls don’t appear to think much themselves. They are gullible and obedient, never pausing to examine their own motives long enough to
consider the feelings of their prey, and dishonesty of any kind is inscrutable to most of them. Contact with Earthlings alters their self-image so profoundly that Fleur actually goes insane.
The supporting cast is about at Ronan’s acting skill level, though I thought that Chandler Canterbury did a good job for a kid his age. While the plot dragged a little after Wanda/Melanie settled in at the rebel camp, the drama and Fleur’s consistent downward spiral kept things fairly interesting. I was personally unsatisfied with the ending, but that’s because I am a little bored with Meyer’s motif of pseudo-Christian self-sacrifice, which played out so
repetitively in Twilight.
Despite the silly ending, The Host had some decent thinking material in it, particularly the unresolved questions
regarding the fate of Earth’s remaining humans and their soon-to-be-not-dominant alien counterparts. The heavier questions may contribute to this film’s comparative unpopularity. But see it anyway–it’s far from bad. The Host was a surprise and I’m pleased to be able to recommend it. Fans who grew up with Twilight might be ready for a
more adult take on its core themes, and those who tried and failed to enjoy the first Meyers products may find this more substantive.
