Film Reviews	Oh No, There Goes Seoul!: The Host by M. Faust

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Trailer for "The Host"

The Host is the top-grossing film in the history of South Korean cinema, and it’s not hard to see why. Unlike much of the Korean cinema that gets exported internationally, this is not an “art film,” even if the fact that it has subtitles relegates it to the arthouse circuit in the US. On the other hand, it is also more than a state-of-the-art monster movie: Asian patrons who came to see the giant, slimy, nasty, carnivorous beastie came back for repeat viewings because of the characters and the way they represent Koreans of their generation.

Still, let’s not gloss over the fact: This is a giant monster movie, a genre that hasn’t been very lively of late. American horror movies are almost exclusively concerned with pasting the titles of once-dangerous movies from the 1970s onto generic exercises in torture and slaughter. Special effects have moved into more everyday realms, or into fantasies that attract a family (i.e., more lucrative) market. Even the Japanese seem to have abandoned Godzilla, Mothra and Ultraman for increasingly murky ghost stories.

The Host tips a hat to genre demands in the opening scene, in which an arrogant American military officer capriciously forces a Korean lab technician to dump dozens of bottle of formaldehyde down the drain, just because they’re dusty. The tech protests that the drain empties into the Han River, a central aspect of the Seoul cityscape, but pour he must.

Six years later, some residents of the city are enjoying a sunny day on the banks of the Han when they spot something odd dangling from a bridge. It drops into the water and can barely be seen under the surface as it approaches shore. Fascinated, the people do what most people do when they see something unrecognizable in the water—they throw things at it. Food, beer cans, whatever is laying around.

Big mistake.

Unlike monster movies that spend a lot of time struggling to provide a plausible backstory before giving us what we came to see, The Host gets right into it. Using special effects labs that have contributed to films from King Kong and The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Sin City, director Bong Joon-ho gives us lots of opportunities to look at this fast-moving beast. But he never focuses on it long enough to let it grow fixed in our minds, thus keeping it malleable and at least a bit mysterious. Suffice to say that it maneuvers as well on land as it does in the water (making up in speed what it lacks in grace) and that it is carnivorous.

Retreating back into the water to digest its meal, the monster fades into the background for a bit while The Host moves on to other things. Such as, how does a city react when a giant hungry amphibian attacks the locals? Of course, they round up the survivors, put them into quarantine and start scrambling madly for explanations.

This is the predicament into which the Park family is caught. Their family business is a fast food stand on the bank of the Han River, so they were right in the thick of things. They barely even have time to mourn the daughter who was eaten by the monster before the government starts poking and prodding them, under the flimsy excuse that the beast is carrying a mutant disease. (That’s as good an explanation as we get for the title, though it proves to me a red herring.)

But when a cell phone tips them off that young Hyun-seo (Ko A-sung) is alive and captive in an underwater cave, the Parks spring into action, albeit of a markedly dysfunctional variety. The aged father is hard-pressed to get past his compulsion to obey authority and remain where he is. But he’s pulled along by his three adult children: Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), an overaged slacker and the girl’s father; brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il), an overeducated office worker who unemployment is everyone’s fault but his own; and sister Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na), an Olympic archery champion. (And yes, you’re meant to guess that that skill will come in handy.)

If this sounds like a lot to have going on in one monster fest, you’re starting to get the idea. The Host is alternately sci-fi action, a social satire, a slapstick comedy and political commentary. It doesn’t stay in any one mode for very long, which may annoy viewers who think that a funeral is an inappropriate time to stage pratfalls, or who will want to know just what is the American government’s complicity in the aftermath of the monster attack. Think of it as a cinematic buffet: You may not get all of what you want, but you will get a lot of different tastes, and you’re unlikely to come away feeling empty.