I had been meaning to watch The Host when it came out on DVD: after all, it’s one of the best reviewed movies of 2007, and has an impressive 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. And it’s an Asian giant monster movie and one of the most popular films in South Korea ever. There was no way I could be disappointed by it, right?
Wow, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.
Firstly, the movie is this amalgam of comedy, drama, action, thriller, just about every genre you can think of. That’s the big problem, too: it’s the most unfocused movie I’ve seen in a long time. It starts out promisingly enough, with hints of a monster born from the mean-spirited American "we’ll do whatever we want" attitude. And the initial monster attack is good (though, you know, if a monster is running around, it might be a better idea to run AWAY from it, rather than parallel to it). But the movie then just starts jumping to 4 or 5 different threads: there’s the disfunctional family that must work together to save their daughter/niece, a sinister cover-up by the government, another sinister plot by the Americans, the touching story of survival of regurgitated kids, and many, many more.
None of it makes any sense. At one point, the main character (Park, father of one of the regurgitated kids) apparently gets lobotomized, but shrugs it off. The government wants to keep him under wraps, except they let him have his cell phone all the time. His family is no better: each must come to terms with certain failures in their lives in order to defeat the monster. But we really don’t get any idea why they are the way they are.
And then there’s some plot with the Americans using some super-weapon (think Oxygen Destroyer) that is supposed to kill the monster and other living things, but seems to randomly leave our heroes perfectly fine, while others start bleeding from their ears. Plus, it seems like a good amount of firepower would have worked perfectly fine on the creature, rather than some convoluted super-weapon.
At two hours, the movie is about an hour and a half too long and seems disjointed and confused most of the time. There are some nice moments of suspense and a few surprises here and there, but it doesn’t make up for the mind-numbingly bad parts. After the movie, I felt lobotomized.
Now, I did watch the dubbed version (a big mistake, I’m sure, but I doubt subtitles would have helped), and I’ll admit that the dubbing was awful (sounded like the guys from MXC doing voices) and that likely was distracting. But watching in Korean wasn’t going to improve this turd.
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