The Host is a movie that was written, produced, and released (for reasons passing understanding) by humans.
And that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.
This is a joyless enterprise, completely devoid of energy, passion, levity, and hope. And for a movie that is ostensibly built around the concept of what it truly means to be human, it lacks any sense of humanity.
Based upon the novel by Stephanie Meyer (clue number one), The Host is set in the near future, where an alien race has conquered Earth, not by brute force, per se, but by inhabiting our bodies and reshaping the world into a utopian ideal, where crime, poverty, and all the ills to which man and flesh are heir have been eradicated. Unfortunately, so, too, has been the concept of free will.
But there are pockets of resistance, evidenced when we meet Melanie (Saoirse Ronan), a young woman who attempts to kill herself in an effort to keep the invading aliens away from her younger brother. The aliens capture Melanie, who has somehow survived a leap from a five-story window directly onto concrete, and implant one of their own (known simply as Wanderer) into her body.
Wanderer soon realizes that Melanie’s spirit has survived, and the two souls inhabiting the same body seek out other pockets of resistance and attempt to save her brother and take the first steps toward freeing humanity.
To cut to the chase, this is a terrible script breeding a terrible film that misses the mark (and the tree, for that matter) every time it pulls back the bow. Any tension in the movie is implied, not felt, and every plot twist introduced is boring, not because it’s inherently uninteresting or because it’s easy to call but because the movie doesn’t seem interested in making them otherwise.
Director and co-screenwriter Andrew Niccol has put together a perfectly coherent but entirely sterile story that has no tension, no interest, and no spark to make it worth watching.
I’m not a filmmaker, but I do have a knack for being able to tell when a movie doesn’t care about its own material. This is a film that was greenlit because it was Stephanie Meyer’s last thing, and there’s still five years before it’s viable or even advisable to reboot Twilight.
This is a movie without drive, without ambition, and (most damning at all) without interest in what it’s about. If the story didn’t show that just in its unfurling, then the cast backs it up by failing to do anything remotely resembling acting.
Even Diane Kruger, cast in what I guess is the villain role of the Seeker (tasked with finding the rebels and using Wanderer/Melanie to find them) is bland at best. William Hurt, one of the best and most underrated actors in the history of anywhere, delivers what could be charitably described as a paint-by-numbers performance as the old man running the rebellion as well as the “human soul” of the movie.
Ronan comes the closest to delivering a real performance, since, as the lead, she’s the one with the most to gain and/or lose, and I’m willing to bet that there’s no other rationale behind that.
Her performance is at least one that conveys some effort, but the script and the story is working extraordinarily hard to drag that effort out of her and make her come across as yet another thoughtless marionette.
This is a lazy movie, derived from a terrible script that offers no emotion, no integrity, and no reason for an audience to give anything remotely resembling an interest in what’s happening on a screen that projects human beings as appearing up to twenty feet tall.
You have to really be phoning it in to turn the moviegoing experience into the least interesting event of your life, somewhere between picking up your dog’s droppings at the park and waiting in line at the DMV.
I hate this movie.
High-Def Presentation
Universal brings The Host to Blu-ray with a clean and completely palatable 1080p MPEG-4 AVC-encoding that takes advantage of the format to the best of its abilities. Much of the movie takes place in the desert, however, and the natural sunlight tends to render the visual experience muted, at best. Black levels are there, but they don’t provide enough definition, and images are prone to become blurry and ill-defined.
This isn’t a gripe at the team who assembled the Blu-ray, who I’m willing to grant were doing the best they could with what they had. But what they had was a washed-out print that becomes a pain on the eyes more often than it doesn’t.
The sound design is decent, with the DTS HD Master Audio 5.1 mix, but with no real mixing of sounds to speak of, the movie would’ve come across just as easily and naturally with a standard MONO track. Dialogue is clean and understandable, but the few expansive moments the film does offer doesn’t allow for an immersive experience – if nothing else, we’re able to understand too much of the dialogue, and with the script by Niccol, that’s to the detriment of us all.
Beyond the Feature
The only real interesting feature isn’t interesting at all – an audio commentary with Meyer, Niccol, and producer Nick Wechstler. It offers little to no insight into the art of filmmaking and writing, and – again – serves to do little more than make its audience stupider while pretending that it isn’t.
There are also a handful of deleted scenes that wouldn’t have affected the movie in one way or another, as well as the standard-issue less-than-15-minutes Making Of featurette.
Have I mentioned that I hate this movie?
Because I hate this movie.
This is the third draft of this review. The first two fell all over themselves trying to offer the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt while being as genial as humanly possible. And they both obfuscated the truth that this movie is perhaps the most amorphous, unengaging, terrible piece of filmmaking I have ever seen in my natural or any other life.
I hate this movie.
Shop for The Host on Blu-ray and DVD combo for a discounted price at Amazon.com (July 9, 2013 release date).
