Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

When I first got my copy of THE HOST, something I had been after for years and years but was unwilling to pay $15 just for a used copy (I finally found one for $2 and didn’t hesitate to snatch it), this was not the review I had expected to be writing. After years of hype about what a terrific movie it was, how amazing, how awesome, I was expecting to write a very different review. But after sitting through the nearly 2 hour movie and spending a day reflecting on it, I’m writing this review instead, and this review differs greatly from the one I’d expected to write. In that one, I praise the movie’s story and effects, I go on and on about how badly you need to see this movie.

In this review, I begin by saying “You can’t always believe the hype.”

THE HOST is a 2006 big monster movie made in Korea. Now when I heard “big monster”, I assumed the thing would be on par with Godzilla or the Cloverfield monster, something, you know, big and monstrous. The creature in this movie is maybe a little bit bigger than a Ford Windstar. It’s a beastly creature with a long tail it uses to snatch and grab or to perform acrobatics on the beams under the bridges of Seoul. It’s ugly as hell and it eats anything in its path, but it’s not that big and that’s one strike.

The plot focuses on one Korean family who owns a food stand near the Han River. One day this creature emerges from the water and just goes nuts on everyone gathered, eating and killing dozens of people. One of the people is snatches is a 9-year-old girl, Hyun-Seo, daughter of Gang-Doo whose father owns the food stand. The monster grabs her and disappears with her. Later, everyone is gathered in a relief center where they’re staging a memorial for all those lost in the attack.

The news tells reports that one of the men who tried to step in and stop the creature is now showing signs of being infected by some kind of virus. Since Gang-Doo was also trying to help and got some of the creature’s blood on his face, his family is quarantined as well. But late that night, Gang-Doo gets a call on his cell from his daughter. She’s alive, trapped in some kind of sewer from which she can’t escape.

Gang-Doo tries desperately to get someone in charge to listen and go look for his daughter, but they insist she never called, that he’s delusional from the virus. So he and his family escape and the rest of the movie is Gang-Doo, his father and his brother and sister, searching the sewers for the missing girl.

So . . . all that hype I read for those many years and the story is about a guy in search of his missing daughter. Wow. How . . . original? Alright, then. You know why so many stories have this plot, the parent going after some missing kid during a catastrophe? Because it’s easy. Most people have kids, and if they don’t, most of them at least know someone with kids, and we can sympathize with their plight, because who among us doesn’t feel like we’d be that person in that situation. If something like that was going down and one of our kids, or the kid of a close friend or relative, was taken, we’d move Heaven and Earth to rescue them. We’d be the hero. We’d save the day. Hells yeah.

So lazy writers use this ploy to reel us in and make us root for their character, even if their character has no other redeeming qualities. Gang-Doo is one of those characters. He’s lazy, always falling asleep at the food stand--his father has to lift Gang-Doo’s face off the money to give a customer their change--he eats customers’ food while he’s cooking it for them, and he’s just generally a loser. And we’re supposed to identify with this character because he goes in search of his missing daughter.

You want to know how she got taken? He was holding her hand and running from the monster. They tripped, fell, he reached out blindly, grabbed a hand and took of again. When he looked back he saw he was holding someone else’s daughter’s hand. He let go, looked back, saw he’d left his daughter behind and stood there in shock as the monster ran up, grabbed her in its tail, and dove into the Han River.

And that’s our hero.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying THE HOST is a terrible movie, it was still good despite the overused plot. It had many twists and turns for our characters, it did an excellent job of making the daughter a very strong and heroic figure, and it definitely held my interest for those 119 minutes. I just wasn’t impressed by the main character or the plot.

The effects were alright but, again, I was hoping for better. There were many shots of the monster that had CGI written all over them. I know, it was 2006 and things have come a long long way even in these intervening 7 years, but still. It wasn’t quite as convincing as I’m sure the filmmakers had hoped it would be.

The direction was good, the acting too. A few of the American cameos were too well-known and took me out of the movie, especially Scott Wilson’s, but the Korean cast was really good.

The script was well-written with very natural dialogue, especially from the secondary characters. The movie played well with tension, especially in the scenes with the daughter, and used humor to keep the mood from becoming too grim given the nature of the story, but I didn’t feel the humor was overdone.

I liked THE HOST. I can’t say I’ll ever watch it again--it’s a good 20 minutes longer than it needs to be and some of the earlier scenes go on way too long and progress way too slowly--but I enjoyed it. I didn’t find myself checking the time while watching it, which says a lot. I’m just disappointed that I wasn’t blown away by it, like I’d expected to be. So many years of reading what an amazing big monster movie it is, and then to find out it’s not THAT big and the plot is a cliché, and not even a very interesting cliché at that. In fact, the plot’s a bit of a cheat, really, when so many original ideas could easily have taken its place here.

But it was a good movie. It’s not “a seriously scary freakout” like one blurb on the DVD box claims, nor is it “one of the greatest monster movies ever made,” like another reads. But it was pretty good. I got my $2 worth


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older