All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic. Or not.
The Host, based on Stephenie Meyer's first non-Twilight novel, is another young-adult romance thriller where teenagers fall desperately in love even when it puts their lives in danger. It's not as depressing as The Hunger Games, where kids were forced to kill each other, but it's in the same ballpark. It's thankfully missing the conservative sexual politics of the Twilight series, though it does hinge on a romance between two characters of wildly varying ages, in soul if not in body. Twilight was about a 100-year-old vampire who fell for a 17-year-old girl; The Host is about a 1000-year-old alien of indistinct sex who simultaneously falls in love with the 18-year-old girl whose body it inhabits, and one of the girl's hunky friends as well.
The alien is called Wanderer, or Wanda for short (ugh). It comes to earth as one of many invaders, "souls," who have taken over the planet and inhabited the bodies of human beings. Wanderer is placed in the body of Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan), a dissident who is one of few humans still alive. But something is different about Melanie: her identity stays alive inside Wanderer, talks to her, and can sometimes control her. Wanderer, like her namesake, becomes curious about Melanie, and helps her to find her family, who are still alive in the desert somewhere.
The setup is intriguing, and the love story just unlikely enough to be interesting. This is a movie crying out for a director like Andrei Tarkovsky, who might have honestly explored the idea of a thousand-year-old being discovering earth for the first time. Wanderer, who has been traveling the universe for a millennium, finally finds something on earth that she hasn't before, and Ronan is a good enough actress that she portrays this believably in early scenes.
The invading race of souls, unlike those in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is not made up of faceless and emotionless pods, but of real, believable, advanced, evolved people who are merely colonizers. They portray a society that knows it has advanced far beyond any others in the universe, and thinks nothing of eradicating the dominant species on earth. But beyond that, they are smart, kind, courteous, and unfailingly honest, which leads to a funny car-theft scene that wouldn't have been out of place in The Invention of Lying.
The trouble is that the movie falls prey to Meyer's hokey writing, and it becomes gradually more interested in telling a teenage love story than an intergalactic emotional thriller. Like in the Twilight films, we're asked to believe that an age-old wise traveler from beyond the stars just needed a little old school making out. The kissy-kissy stuff grows more invasive, and the movie becomes less and less interesting.
The communication between the inner Melanie and the outer Wanderer also becomes silly, though there may not have been a non-silly way to portray it. We hear an ambient voice-over of Melanie's thoughts as she talks from within Wanderer, but I wonder what it might have been like if we only saw and heard Wanderer, and if Melanie's influence on her were implied. Melanie's dialogue from inside Wanderer leads to some of the movie's dumbest moments, as she's reduced to making snarky sarcastic remarks whenever Wanderer gets kissy-kissy with Ian (Jake Abel), one of the humans living with Melanie's family.
The writer and director is Andrew Niccol, whose first film, Gattaca, was as thoughtful and poignant as any sci-fi film since Solaris. Like all of the talented directors who tried their hand at a Twilight movie, he gives it his all, but Meyer only takes the story skin-deep. Wanderer is an intriguing character, but her schoolgirl crush on Ian doesn't build from anything and goes nowhere. She's meant to have a growing fascination with human beings, but it's not represented as anything but a teenage fantasy. The ending is a real cop-out.
Ronan does what she can, and there's an emotional farewell between Wanderer and Melanie that's well-made and genuine; though the writing is clunky, Ronan and Niccol play it right. There's a setup here for a great sci-fi film, but the relationships in the film just aren't believable. It is, like Twilight, a lot of dead space amid some interesting ideas.
** out of ****
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