Review: The Host (2013)
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Max Irons, Jake Abel
Director: Andrew Niccol
Country: USA
Genre: Action | Adventure | Romance | Sci-Fi | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here
Even Stephenie Meyer’s worst detractors – of which they are legion – would have to begrudgingly admit that the Twilight series struck a chord, however wrong-headed, however, regressive, initially with her YA (young adult) audience and later with women of all ages. At its core, the Twilight series functioned as escapist, romantic fantasy, albeit with a supernatural twist (vampires and werewolves) and a thinly disguised pro-abstinence, reactionary-conservative viewpoint that Meyer’s readers seemed to find either unobjectionable or simply willfully ignored. The Twilight series’ big-screen incarnation, however, ended last November. Luckily for Meyer’s fans (and unluckily for everyone else), Open Road Films snagged the film rights three-and-a-half years ago to Meyer’s first non- Twilight novel, The Host, a sci-fi action-romance that’s almost as insipid, unimaginative, and uninspired as anything in the Twilight series.
…a sci-fi action-romance that’s almost as insipid, unimaginative, and uninspired as anything in the Twilight series.
There was hope, slim hope, but hope nonetheless that writer-director Andrew Niccol (In Time, Lord of War, The Truman Show, Gattaca), would, through skill, talent, and sheer force of will, eliminate or otherwise ameliorate Meyer’s flaws as a writer and The Host’s flaws as a novel. Not surprisingly, that hope had little, actually no, relation to the real world. All of Meyer’s failings as a writer are present in The Host: a derivative storyline shamelessly cribbed from significantly superior novels and/or cinematic adaptations (e.g., Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters), shoddy world building, hormonally driven hetero-teens, idealized heterosexual monogamy, otherworldly obstacles to that goal, a faux-romantic triangle (upgraded to a quadrangle here), cringe-inducing dialogue (both to hear and see performed by obviously talented), and the obligatory sequel-ready ending.
Signs of The Host’s problems can be found in the introductory voiceover spoken by an off-screen William Hurt. That a one-time Academy Award-winning actor has a prominent role in The Host shouldn’t come as a surprise (aging actors often take roles below their talent levels), but his disappearance from the next forty-five minutes is. Hurt’s character, Jeb, isn’t the protagonist. Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan), Jeb’s niece, is. She’s also captured within the first few minutes of The Host. Parasitic aliens (“Souls” in Meyer’s painfully unimaginative parlance), using human bodies as hosts, have taken effective control of the Earth. They’ve eliminated poverty, violence, war, and environmental degradation, substituting a cold, antiseptic, rational order of material comfort in their place. The aliens absorb their hosts’ memories (and presumably their emotions), but the host’s human personality rarely, if ever, survives.
Melanie proves to be the exception. She survives, albeit in a diminished state, unable to interact with the outside world or, with the occasional exception, control her body. She can, however, communicate with the alien, awkwardly named “Wanderer” (like Meyer, the aliens are short on imagination). Through risible exchanges between the spoiled-, petulant-sounding Melanie and the rationally oriented Wanderer, Melanie convinces the alien to leave her big-city life behind to find the last remaining survivors, including Melanie’s uncle, Melanie’s boyfriend, Jared Howe (Max Irons), and Melanie’s younger brother, Jamie (Chandler Canterbury). One particular human-hating alien, Seeker (Diane Kruger), pursues Melanie/Wanderer Fugitive-style.
…a derivative storyline shamelessly cribbed from significantly superior novels and/or cinematic adaptations (e.g., Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters), shoddy world building, hormonally driven hetero-teens..
Once Melanie/Wanderer find the human survivors, comfortably ensconced inside a hollowed-out mountain. She’s met with fear, anger, derision, and, on at least one occasion, violence. Melanie/Wanderer is, after all, the enemy. Unfortunately, The Host jettisons the chase plot element early on, devolving into seemingly endless discussions about Melanie/Wanderer’s fate, whether Melanie’s personality still exists inside her body, and whether Jared will accept his former girlfriend and her split personality, or whether another survivor, Ian O’Shea (Jake Abel), will complicate matters. Ian does, of course; otherwise The Host wouldn’t be a Stephenie Meyer novel. Occasional forays into a nearby city give The Host periodic action-oriented jolts while the relentless, bordering-on-unhinged Seeker gets closer to finding the human sanctuary.
That, of course, assumes anyone sitting on the other side of the movie screen will care. Frequent gaps or jumps in logic, narrative dead spots, languid, leisurely pacing, and an underwritten romantic quadrangle to sort out, The Host meanders from one marginally connected plot point to another. And even after The Host seems to be over, resolving the Wanderer-Seeker conflict (disappointingly, it should be added) and the faux-romantic quadrangle (only slightly less ridiculous than Meyer’s resolution of the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle), Niccol teases a sequel that promises more human-alien conflict and perhaps, bigger, more elaborate set pieces, but only if The Host somehow manages to equal or even approximate the Twilight franchise’s box-office success.
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