The Host
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
In the new Korean monster movie The Host, the term “seo-ri” means “a borrowing game.” This “right of the homeless” is invoked to describe what an orphaned boy does in the midst of monster panic: he scavenges for food just before joining a little girl hiding-out in the sea creature’s lair. The Host represents director Bong Joon-ho’s scavenging of pop art clichés—not an apotheosis. It’s too lame to admire, too cruddy to praise.
Bong starts with a conventional post-WWII creature-feature premise: At a South Korea U.S. Army base in 2000, an American scientist callously commands that chemicals be dumped in the Han River. In a six-year flash-forward, the ecological threat becomes real when a gargantuan mutation rises out of Han River. It’s grey, slimy, bug-eyed and tentacled. This misshapen beast not only threatens the city but exposes America’s perfidious military industrial complex. Even the means of fighting the monster involves dangerous U.S. interference (using “Agent Yellow” gas)—a tactic opposed by the film’s family of Korean hero-protagonists. If this simplistic political commentary (and antagonism) could be taken seriously it might be offensive. Instead, it’s part of The Host’s action-movie foolishness and general ineptitude. Bong imitates familiar monster movie tropes—even copying the two-fisherman-caught-by-surprise intro from Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws—in a failed attempt at resignifying a hoary genre.
But The Host is backwards. Jaws didn’t have to make fatuous political comments since its essence was in the quotidian American response to both unfathomable natural danger and comically banal American habit. Bong essays the post-industrial monster movie without deepening its tropes. Its “realism” comes right out of Godzilla. If American viewers are honest with themselves (as American critics tend not to be), they’ll have to admit that watching The Host makes unreasonable demands: It requires that they repress the sophistication that monster movies have gained, starting with Jaws.
In The Host, Bong drags action cinema back to cornball exposition, back to hokey action set-pieces of frightened stampedes, a heartfelt speech followed by sudden death and other cliches. Despite the low anticipation of enjoying the most basic of cinematic thrills—the chase par excellence—nothing in The Host is done with Spielberg’s panache. Sorry, that’s the standard. The visual richness that makes every frame of War of the Worlds a kinetic, hallucinatory, politically-loaded work of art is not matched by Bong’s frowziness.
There’s a desperate, anything-for-an-effect style in the way Bong interweaves action scenes of the monster with the character-defining family scenes. Thrills mixed with Sentimentality. Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) is a listless young widower who sleeps while minding his father’s shop. He comes alert only when his daughter, schoolgirl Hyun-seo (Ko A-sung), is abducted by the sea monster. This event plunges the Park family into the social chaos that results from mass panic. Incarceration, scientific experimentation, government bureaucracy and gang violence—it all occurs with wearying shifts of tone as if Bong had no control over his material or no consistent vision of the story he’s telling.
Gang-du, his father (Byun Hee-bong), his brother (Park Hae-il) and his sister (Bae Doo-na) overcome their fractured family dynamics to hunt down the creature and save Hyun-seo. Problem is, Bong is following in the path of Spielberg’s mastery in Jaws, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds (just as Scorsese’s The Departed was following the mastery of Andrew Lau’s Infernal Affairs) and no amount of parochial special pleading can disguise the imitator’s inferiority.
Overall, The Host looks like crudely commercial hackwork—despite its reputation coming from international art film festivals. Critics and festival-goers who are inclined to overrate this kind of filmmaking, such as scholar David Bordwell’s recent academic apologies for Asian pop cinema, seem to be expressing an anti-American cultural snobbery. Critics over-value Bong’s clichés while ignoring Hollywood ingenuity that comes down to not being able to see and appreciate what’s on the screen.
Bong’s own scavenging experiment could only be termed a success if it matched Spielberg’s splendor or surpassed the wit of that three-eyed fish that pops up near the nuclear power plant in occasional episodes of “The Simpsons.” Instead, Bong’s “seo-ri” is mediocre. The monster itself is a letdown. At first, its skin—with an iridescent sardine-like sheen as it slides through the water—makes for a fascinating special effect. But every time Bong shows the amphibious monster (oddly referred to as “an Amazonian river dolphin”) it becomes insipid. On land, it lopes playfully, then stupidly, then with menace. Its body movement is silent, having the strange, cheapo effect of no characterization.
Bong ruinously misses out on endowing his creature with the human characters’ apprehension. After all, wasn’t it the genius of Jaws, the Jurassic Park movies and War of the Worlds to illustrate that nightmare creatures were aggregates of our fears? To truly value cinema as an international art, there’s no reason to esteem Asian pop over Hollywood pop. The global enjoyment of Hollywood cinema means no viewer needs to be a homeless scavenger.
