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Director: Bong Joon-ho
Screenplay: Baek Chul-hyun and
Bong Joon-ho
Cast: Song Kang-ho (as Park
Gang-du); Byun Hee-bong (as Park Hee-bong); Park Hae-il (as Park Nam-il); Bae
Doona (as Park Nam-joo); Go Ah-sung (as Park Hyun-seo);
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #12
The Host is an interesting case of a kaiju/monster movie if shrunk
to concentrate on a small character piece; while Hollywood blockbusters tend to
downscale their drama to one character and their family to a detriment, this is
deliberately a drama about a dysfunctional family first which just happens to
centre around a crisis that effects the local population. Chemicals poured into
the Han river creates a mutated aquatic beast that terrorises the locals and
may spread a virus to those who come into contact with it, but the central
drama is not a scientist or the military trying to destroy the beast like in a
Toho film from Japan, but a less than perfect family. A divorced slacker (Kang-ho), whose daughter (Ah-sung) is captured by the beast, and
is followed by his father (Hee-bong),
his sister (Doona) who is a professional
archer, and the washed up, alcoholic second son (Hae-il) to try to rescue her when they discover she's still alive.
The combination of comedy and
drama, more common in Asian cinema and trademark especially with modern South
Korean cinema, does work exceptionally well as it fleshes out the characters
rather than feel inappropriate, helped by the fact that once you've adapted to
it its paced out carefully. What does falter the film a litter, dating the film
to the Bush Jr. era, is the
anti-American political context where the US military take a heavy handed and
problematic attitude to trying to stop the beast. This does feel like the one
flaw of the film when the 1954 Godzilla
film could simply present a beast created from nuclear power and just hint from
that image of themes hidden between the lines of such a creature. Instead it's
the family drama that's significantly more rewarding.
What's dated well, as it uses
extensive CGI, is the beast itself, a Weta
Workshop creation digitally, with animatronics from another studio, that
still looks exceptionally good and is helped by the fact that, because Bong-Jong Ho made the film a quiet
dramatic-comedy in-between the action, the most extensive scenes with the beast
have a greater effect and don't present it in a way that'd reveal its seams. That
the film matches the type of subtlety that the director showed in Memories of Murder (2003), including a
more honesty and bitter sweet ending, does cement the great qualities of the
film.
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