The Host is one of those movies that was really nowhere near what I expected going in to it. I felt after seeing the trailers, I believed that The Host would be an action packed science fiction movie about aliens. The Host has what I would definitely consider to be a really exciting premise. This is the movie that takes a look at what would happen to the Earth if an alien invasion movie was successful in the end. In The Host aliens called "souls" have taken over our bodies and have been able to take over our personalities and emotions and replace them with their own. Yet, it takes this concept and throws it to the next level by then asking what would happen if what would be a perfect operation does not go perfect and that one of the human souls does not go into submission so easily and instead fights back against this invasion of her body and head. I am sure that there are a lot of movie goers that will find The Host to be a slow and uneventful movie when instead character driven drama is the goal here.
Saoirse Ronan as the role of Melanie/Wanderer does a good job with the simple fact that she is playing the alien as well as the human and has to have conversations within her head. While some of the inner head dialogue I found to be a little laughable at times, there were more times when it really worked well. Max Irons in the role of Jared as well as Jake Abel as Ian while they were serviceable they were really not fully developed characters like I would have liked to have seen. In the end while this movie was nothing like the Twilight movies which was a great thing, the portrayal of these two characters was way too similar to that of Edward and Jacob. Diane Kruger in the role of the Seeker, while my wife hated the role because she was so different from the way she was described in the book, I did not like her simply because as the antagonist there was nothing there. I don't know what it was but I just did not care about her either way, I did not feel the dislike that a good villain is able to arise in the audience. The supporting cast do a decent job I really enjoyed William Hurt and Chandler Canterbury as Uncle Jeb and Jamie. The way William Hurt carries himself as the survivor Uncle was just spot on for what I would expect.
What develops for the story for The Host is not as ingenious as I would have hoped for in the end. They really could have taken this unique story and taken it a lot of different ways, but instead they took it to the familiar last hope for humanity stories, that focuses more on the survivors sitting around talking about the situation rather then trying to do something about it. For me I felt that the opening scene was a great start and had a solid opening pace, but after that point for some reason the pacing never overly moves like you would expect in a movie, instead it just kind of coasts. the direction of Andrew Niccol, who in my opinion has a great ability to give the movie goer inventive stories about people who are stuck by their circumstances. In The Host though Niccol has his hands tied a lot more simply because he has a script based on the book written by Stephanie Meyers who everyone when hearing her name immediately thinks of the Twilight series. The Host is tilted toward something meaningful but with having his hands tied so much the movie never seems to get out of first gear.
The Host was a movie that was unexpectedly better then the expectations I had going in. Movies like The Host that are based on a book always makes me ask the question after seeing the movie, "Do I want to now go and read the book?" I am looking forward to reading the book in the near future and see how it compared to the movie and if the book goes over some of the plot points that got glossed over in the movie. The acting was just decent and basically had some that were better then I thought and others that were under what I would expect. The pacing for The host never really went anywhere and it felt like they had a great start and in the end just took the pacing and drove around in circles. I am giving The Host three buckets of popcorn out of five. This is one movie that I would say is worth the price of admission to see in the theaters.
-The Movie Man
No comments:
Post a Comment