The Host

It's not often a director tries to do a modern day Godzilla, but that's essentially what Bong Joon-Ho has done. Now, I don't recall if I've ever seen the original Godzilla, though my recollection is that the creature is spawned from nuclear blasts, and then terrorizes Tokyo. There's some subplot involving a scientist sympathetic to the creature, I think.

Unlike, say, King Kong, where the beast was very much a character, perhaps even the antagonized protagonist, the monster, which appears like some oddish lizard, is very much a monster. It seems to grab people and pluck them into some location in some sewer. For some reason, Asian sewers are much larger than American ones.

People have likened the film to Little Miss Sunshine because of similar family dynamics: an irascible grandfather, what appears to be two brothers and a sister, and the daughter of one of the brothers. She gets kidnapped by the creature and the family, once they find she's alive, mounts a rescue.

Bong is able to mine some comedy out of this as well, especially in an early scene, when pandemonium strikes and people are running all about as they are wont to do in a monster flick. Father, Gang-Gu, grabs daughter and they run. Using slow-mo effects, the father runs and then the daughter comes into focus, except it's some gawky girl in glasses, and hey, that's not his daughter, then her father comes running aside.

Or in a scene that resembles Korean New Orleans post-Katrina, the family is in what amounts to be something like a gymnasium, and are distraught at the daughter who they think has died. The outpouring of misery which starts as touching becomes vaguely ridiculous. The college-educated brother blames his brother for not protecting his daughter, the overhead view of the four family members bickering while crying has got to be a directorial comedic triumph.

For some reason, the film also reminded me of Pan's Labyrinth, for the little girl's pluck in dire circumstances, and the kind of ick that you would think would terrify girls, but which both these film's heroines put up with. Not nearly as gritty as Pan's Labyrinth, The Host is much more light-hearted. In its way, there's even element of Cellular, the high concept film, that asks, how much can you do with a cell phone as your primary plot point.

Through it all, there is political commentary, including the disregard of Americans for the environment, to families that must steal food just to survive. Its ending is a bit surprising and touching too, taking a direction that doesn't feel too cheap nor too forced.

Go watch The Host. It's a hoot.