Cinema Hype

A few things about The Host (Gwoemul). First of all (because I know you want to know): It’s not scary. If you can handle, say, Jurassic Park, The Host is small potatoes, cowering-in-terror-wise. Second of all: Not so much of a “monster movie” as a “family dramedy with incidental slimy creature.” Third of all: They really don’t like the ‘mericans so much, do they? (I can’t imagine why not…)

As a complete unit, The Host is either multi-textured or inconsistent, depending on your point of view. Director Bong Joon-ho tells a good story–a classic “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” story–in a way that isn’t so much concerned with consistency of tone as it is with the capturing of moments. He’s a director who seems to care about what’s best scene by scene, which makes for polished scenes that don’t fit together in the traditional way. Instead, he mixes elements of comedy, family drama, action-adventure, and political satire to get his particular brand of storytelling. It’s an unusual recipe, and it works with varying success. Much of the film is beautifully shot, particularly the very beginning and the very end–the climax is especially artistic, all swirly and foggy and surprisingly quiet (it’s essentially a family moment)–but it’s so much more highbrow than the rest of the movie that it may as well be from a different piece of work.

Furthermore, the term “monster movie” is misleading, or maybe incomplete. Maybe it’s just that this monster movie is what more monster movies should be, and what many American monster movies of recent years have failed to grasp–that it’s the people that count. The creature is an impressive bit of CGI–an overgrown people-eating tadpole rampaging through Seoul–but if all goes well, he(?) is just a set-up, a force for change in the lives of characters. The Host carries this off well, focusing on the Parks, an ordinary Korean family struggling with the kinds of ordinary troubles that all families seem to have. When the monster runs off with Hyun-seo (Ah-sung Ko), the daughter/granddaughter/niece, the story becomes about the Parks in relationship to one another more than it becomes about their relationship to the monster. In fact, the monster is literally out of sight during most of the climax scene, which works because it’s true to what the movie is doing–using a monster to tell a story about people. In that way, The Host is unlike many of the monster movies made in recent years (I’m thinking the forgettable Godzilla remake), because long stretches of the movie are monster-free, but it’s also very much like the Platonic monster movie, because it gets what it has to do.

If The Host is about family relationships, it’s also about the relationship of a nation to its own government and to the government of an occupying nation. Bong portrays anybody with political power as the enemy–the South Korean government is inept, and the Americans simply don’t care what kind of havoc they cause. The entire story begins when an American military scientist orders his Korean assistant to dump hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde into the Han river (resulting in an extremely well-preserved monster egg?). The scene is inspired by actual events that occurred on an American military base in 2000, causing public outcry and anti-American sentiment among many Koreans. If The Host is unusually character-based, its political stance is right in line with generations of sci-fi and monster films: eventually, the blame lies with both governments, and the movie adopts a classic monster-movie moral: monsters are dangerous, but people bring real destruction.

movie reviews, The Host, Bong Joon-ho, Gwoemul, Korean cinema