Movie Review: The Host


We breathed a sigh of relief when the last Twilight movie left the theaters. We thought it was the end of the horrible, terrible teen centric romantic horse manure hitting movie screens. We thought it was the end of our suffering. We thought wrong. Say hello to The Host, a new film series from the mind of the genius who came up with Twilight.

Like Twilight, the book series The Host was targeted towards lost, lonely, juvenile preteens who found solace in reading about characters who were just like them. That series didn’t sell as well, but now with the Twilight movies solidifying author Stephanie Meyer’s brand, one can expect the books to fly off the shelves. Whether the film versions of The Host would sell tickets is another thing, because, as hard as it is to believe, it is actually even more horrendous than the Twilight movies.

The story is exactly the same as the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle, except with an unintentionally hilarious science fiction twist. Here we have a world where an alien invasion has resulted in otherworldly beings taking over every single human’s body, thereby making the Earth a clean, fresh, and kind utopia. A small group of uninfected humans remain, who fight against the invaders and strive to continue the human civilization. One of the humans is Melanie (Saoirse Ronan) who has recently been taken over by an alien being, and is now battling with the alien to take control over her body. The Twilight love triangle in this case is two men falling in love with the two entities in the one body.

The waxy bores Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner are outdone by the trio of moldy wood boxes in The Host. Sadly The Host isn’t funny enough to warrant a guilty pleasure of a watch, but it does contain one of the most inadvertently rib tickling scenes of all time, where the two boys kiss the girl one after the other to ascertain which of the two girls they are smooching. The most saddening thing about The Host isn’t the fact that stuff like this makes millions for Stephanie Meyer, but that it is directed by Andrew Niccol, who made Gattaca, one of the greatest, most imaginative and inspiring science fiction films of all time. The only explanation for him volunteering to go behind the cameras for this movie is a sadistic alien from another planet taking over his body and mind to unleash crap into our world. 






(First published in Mid Day)

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