Man, we picked a hell of a film for this week’s Bad Movie Review. The Host is inane, condescending, and possesses nothing even resembling subtly or nuance. Please, sit back and relax while Margaux and I take a butcher knife to this shitpile.
Trevor: I am so, so sorry I suggested this.
Margaux: I still have one, main pressing question from watching The Host – WHY WAS IT TWO HOURS LONG?! They should show this movie to Guantanamo Bay inmates. I swear I lost YEARS of life watching this.
Trevor: It felt like four. This fucking movie would not end. And it was like driving on a road full of potholes, where every hole was a narrative lull.
Normally, when I watch a TV show and take notes, it’ll be a page in my notebook. Movies, two pages. The Host necessitated THREE pages, and I think I mentioned the plot TWICE. Everything else was just questions, the first of which was “Why, Diane Kruger? Why?”
Margaux: For a movie that has fairly decent actresses (and William Hurt’s beard) Saoirse Ronan and Kruger, I felt like everyone, from the props to the extras to the cast, were phoning it the fuck in. It’s like you could see them mentally remodeling their kitchens while saying reheated Twilight lines. Like, if you can’t stay awake long enough to act, I shouldn’t be expected to give The Host my full attention. Cause I didn’t, I was half working on something else for 90% of watching it and I know for a fact, I missed nothing whatsoever.
Trevor: In this post-Twilight world, adapting Stephenie Meyer is basically a license to print money. And they start in on the trite Meyer shit right away. Melanie (Ronan) jumps out of a window to escape the Seekers, and not only does she live, but she has NO RUPTURED ORGANS OR BROKEN BONES. She’s just so special and unique and no one understands her – just like you in the audience, teen girls!
Margaux: You mentioned the word “plot” in regards to this movie earlier, which, there isn’t one. But for a 125 minute long movie, that has zero discernible plot, they throw “true love conquers alien invasions” shit at you fast and hard in the first 5 minutes of the movie. Waste no time teaching young girls that unless you have a man in your life, you are basically worthless. Stephenie Meyer makes Lena Dunham look like fucking Mother Teresa.
Trevor: This movie – and all of Meyer’s writing, really – has some fucking primitive notions of a woman’s place in society and in a relationship, which we will absolutely get to. There’s some more stupid stuff I wanna talk about first, namely the Seekers.
First of all, that blue eye effect is fucking stupid. I’m sure it’s supposed to look unsetttling and otherwordly, but it looks like a bad costume (which it is, but you know what I mean).
Second, the shiny Lotuses that the Seekers drive are…well, they’re actually kinda cool. We know everyone in the future will have a chrome fetish, but all the alien transportation in The Host looked like it was borrowed from Kanye.
Lastly – then I’ll let you get in a word edgewise, I swear! – the aliens are called “Souls,” and once the whole world has allowed a Soul into their body, wars have ceased, disease has been eradicated, and global peace has finally arrived. Real subtle.
Margaux: They spell all this out for you – and then continue to do that for the rest of the movie, which is why it feels ten times longer than it unnecessarily is.
I’ve seen the first Twilight, I know it’s written like a CBS soap opera, but that movie had a certain element of camp (maybe it’s inherent to vampire lore) that actually made it fun to watch. The Host was the polar opposite of that, it’s like Meyers said, “Fuck y’all, I got Twilight money. I do what I want.” So much of the motive of the Seekers could’ve been easily outsmarted by humans; the “future” in Meyers world felt like she read the first half of 1984 and was like, GOT IT.
Yet I digress, there is one thing about The Host that I hated so much more, that fucking inner monologue/voice over of Melanie between her and Wanda/Wanderer.
Oh super quick sidebar – Seeker (Kruger) and Wanderer (Ronan), those names are about as subtle as Wile E. Coyote.
Trevor: You expect subtlety from “Drop Dead Diva but with aliens”?
I wholeheartedly agree with you about the voiceover. This might have worked on paper, but on screen it is super distracting, and for as good an actress as Ronan is (she was Oscar-nominated for Atonement), she can’t come close to salvaging this dumpster fire.
So, Melanie tricks Wanda into driving to the desert, where she plans to meet up with her uncle Jeb (William Hurt). Everyone at the EXTINCT VOLCANO LAIR wants to kill her, but Jeb orders them not to. It is here that Wanderer is rechristened Wanda, and the beefcake parade begins.
Also, talk about not understanding Chekhov’s Gun: you have your hideout in an extinct volcano, and it never erupts. You couldn’t come up with a better example of not understanding narrative structure than that.
And I know, we talked about this via text, but the three studs (Jared, Kyle, and Ian) were impossible to tell apart.
Margaux: Yeah, I have no idea who any of those characters are except for Poor Man’s Devon Sawa, whose name I only learned after I IMDB’ed him because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t Devon Sawa. It wasn’t. It’s Boyd Holbrook – whom I know best from dating Elizabeth Olsen.
You did forget to mention that Melanie (the voice in Wanda’s head) is totally a bitch. On their way to Ft. Worth, Texas to find a Healer to do…GIANT QUESTION MARK/IRRELEVANT, Melanie (who can still control her body, ummm?) rips the steering wheel outta Wanda’s hands cause the most hilarious car crash committed to film. It looked like something outta Anchorman, I’m surprised the car didn’t explode.
Trevor: It was like Lori in season two of The Walking Dead. You know those damn Korean cars will flip over 27 times if you run over a pebble.
Margaux: IT’S A VOLVO!
Trevor: And then Melanie gets out and has nothing but a scraped elbow and a cut on her forehead. Jesus. If this were anything but stupid bullshit, Uncle Jeb would be planning her funeral.
Margaux: Well, once Wanda/Melanie (I just realized how awful those names are too) are rescued to the extinct volcano (that was clearly not being used for Austin Powers) and Uncle Jeb’s beard convinces everyone to be cool and not kill her – Wanda/Melanie literally make out with EVERYONE except Uncle Jeb and the creatively named Doc.
Trevor: Doc and Jeb were dressed like video game characters. Someone played Rage or Fallout: New Vegas and then sat down to write this.
When she gets to the volcano (that’s never not going to look retarded), that’s when The Host’s problems with women start. Ian tries to kill her, and Jared immediately smacks her. Needless to say, she ends up in love with both of them by the end of the film. (Also, Kyle tries to kill her, but at a certain point he disappears, ne’er to be spoken of again.) What it’s saying is that all Melanie needs is a strong male presence in her life, someone to put his arms around her throat I mean shoulders.
Margaux: Let’s be real, the entirety of The Host was Garbage Time. My biggest issue with all the volcano drama was, not only does this movie have not-a-one stake that makes you feel like anyone in this movie will ever be danger, how in the world did those CHICKENS just…materialize…INSIDE AN EXTINCT VOLCANO?!
Trevor: Yeah, Jeb takes her into the subterranean field, the music swells, and we see…wheat. “Oh thank God, we’re saved! We have wheat!” Don’t get me wrong, wheat is important – especially for making precious, precious beer – but ALL they’re growing is wheat. Are you just gonna eat bread and pizza dough forever? God. This fucking movie.
Margaux: Or develop a serious gluten allergy somewhere down the line. Can we talk about the logic of this alien race? Besides having Marilyn Manson eyes, they supposedly always tell the truth to each other (they don’t go into about humans) and can heal super quick with what looks like a bathroom deodorizers mixed with those memory doohickies from MIB, that have the word “Peace” on them. Cause that’s how you know it’s the good stuff.
Trevor: I have so many questions about the Souls. Like, what is their endgame? They’re implanting themselves in all humans, but for what? To do menial tasks and be polite to each other? There’s no motivation here. Also, what is their home planet like? If they need host bodies to perform any sort of labor – which they clearly do, because in their real form they’re just kind of wispy bugs – how did they figure out the technology necessary to travel through space? How did they take over the world, when it clearly takes two of them to implant a Soul into a new host body? At one point Kruger says “We’re losing control,” but where’s the proof of that? Last I checked, there were 7 billion Souls on the planet, and maybe a few hundred humans eating wheat in volcanoes. And Wanda says that she’s been to eight planets that the Souls have “colonized,” so do the Souls reproduce, then send new colonization forces to other planets, or do they just get bored of one and move on to the next? I’M SO CONFUSED. The depressing part about all this is that I know Stephenie Meyer doesn’t know the answers to these questions either.
Margaux: I don’t think Meyer (who wrote the script?) gave those sorts of questions any semblance of thought. Can we talk about the ending that just wouldn’t end. The Host borrowed from The Lord of The Rings (the third one) where you think, oh thank God it’s over and it just…keeps…going…
Trevor: Yes, but first can we talk about the world’s worst Christian allegory? We get it, Wanda is Christ. She’s a being from the heavens who preaches love and forgiveness, is willing to die as a sacrifice, then is reborn (in this case, into poor Emily Browning). It was just so eye-rollingly stupid. I’ve taken dumps that were better allegories (for other, different dumps).
Margaux: Is it still an allegory if the whole thing is explained to you like you’re a small child that can’t go to the bathroom by yourself? Theres always a less than subtle hint in Meyers writing about religious values, sure you can be 16 year old in love with a vampire who’s a million years old, as long as you two wait till marriage to bang it out.
Trevor: And it’s always the guys who want to wait and be chaste – when Melanie was first trying to sleep with Jared she was coming on so strong it was like she went to Arizona State. As you said in our conversation, it’s a housewife fantasy. It’s this teenage masturbatory wish-fulfillment, where if a girl SEEMS like she’s completely devoid of any personality or defining traits, she’s really a special snowflake and every guy in the movie is going to fight over her. Every bland, identical white guy. At some point in her life, Meyer was the new girl in school, and people didn’t immediately recognize how wonderful and perfect she was. Her “literary” career is her billion-dollar revenge.
Margaux: Meyers is like the uptight, religious-y version of tech start up guys that strike it rich and date hella models. But truly, the woman has a type, I couldn’t tell the beefcake parade apart.
So, the ending. Melanie, back in her human, non-bitchy-voice over form, two of the three beefcakes and Wanda, in her new body, get pulled over. This is another perfect example of The Host attempting to establish stakes and it falling 100% flat. Anyway, the car gets pulled over by Seekers and everyone promises each other, “no one gets took” – which is just bad English. The Seeker-Cop gets them all out of the car and lines them to interrogate them. Then Wanda goes another self-righteous speech about how we’re all same or something and then, that’s it! It’s all hand holding and happy endings. I swear, for a split second after Wanda delivers her dumb monologue and everyone smiles like, “yay, we did it!”, I thought that the Seeker-Cop would just spray them all with bullets. END SCENE. Sadly, no.
Trevor: Before that scene, when they were removing Wanda from Melanie’s body, I thought “Hmm, Wanda’s ‘death’ followed by a cut to black would actually be a pretty decent ending,” but NOPE, The Host fucked that up too. Andrew Niccol did Gattaca and In Time (and S1M0NE, but let’s not hold that against him), so the man knows sci-fi…something happened. I guess you can only polish a piece of shit so much. The Host is The Host is The Host. This is as good as it’s gonna get, people.
Margaux: The Host is the reason why voice-overs and the sci-fi genre get a bad wrap, cause this is the sort horribly done shit people expect. I can’t believe Niccol directed Gattaca, I’m sure he’s been a deep depression since the release of the The Host, I know I am, and I had nothing to do with the turd.
Trevor: I could seriously spend another 3,000 words asking questions about this “movie.” Instead let’s talk star count. We – and the readers – have suffered enough. I’m leaning towards half a star, and that’s almost entirely for William Hurt’s beard. That’s the best way I can think of to say “This is worse than Cursed.”
Margaux: At least Cursed and even The Third Wheel had some heart in it – they didn’t make you feel like watching paint dry would be a better use of your time (and they weren’t aggressively long). The Host didn’t have a single laugh, nothing for you to cling onto to want see this movie through, even a little bit. Utterly joyless. It was a series of scenes in a volcano, that looked like a yurt in New Mexico, used as an excuse to get bland, pretty people to make out and make a really bad JC allegory. If it wasn’t for William Hurt’s beard, I would have turned it off and pretended I watched it for this review. Half a star, and even that’s being generous.
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