البـــــوابـــة
The Host
Joon-ho Bong's The Host is a
delirious modern monster movie, a throwback to the classic era of the
sci-fi monster: all those nakedly metaphorical beasts formed from
radiation or other side effects of man's scientific progress. And much
like the classic Japanese monster movies, this Korean film is aimed
squarely at the fear and anger caused by a foreign target: the United
States. The film opens with an awkwardly acted scene in English, in
which an American researcher instructs his Korean assistant to pour a
shelf of chemical bottles down the drain, despite the assistant's
protestations that this will cause harm to the Han River. Cut to a few
years later, and something odd is definitely going on in the river as a
result. Bong's unveiling of the monster — a mutated, somewhat lame sea
creature with numerous vestigial limbs and a massive, terrifying maw —
is the film's best sequence, a frantic action set piece that's both
absurd and terrifying.
The monster appears abruptly, but before
it does, it's just an ordinary day at a riverside park where Hie-bong
(Hie-bong Byeon) runs a snack stand with his lazy, distracted son
Gang-du (Kang-ho Song). Bong takes his time setting up the family
dynamic here, because it's this family that's going to be at the center
of the film once the monster does appear. Hie-bong has two children in
addition to Gang-du: his educated but unemployed son Nam-il (Hae-il
Park) and his athlete daughter Nam-joo (Du-na Bae), a professional
archer who's just shy of being the best. When the monster shows up,
Hie-bong, Gang-du, and Gang-du's daughter Hyun-seo (Ah-sung Ko) are
watching Nam-joo lose a tournament on TV. Bong's presentation of the
monster, interrupting this low-key domestic drama with its touches of
comedy, is disarmingly offhand. The creature is an obvious CGI
construction, with no attempt made to make it fit in naturally as an
organic component of this otherwise realistic world: it stands out as
something totally different, all glossy, slippery surfaces and
distracting artificiality. As it rampages through the crowds gathered on
the riverside, gobbling up some of the crowd and tossing others into
the water with a flick of its tail, it is frightening and hilarious in
nearly equal measures, this oddball CGI monster stalking across the
riverbank as people scream and run. The artificiality of it all just
makes it all the more disconcerting, especially since Bong approaches it
with a goofy sense of humor, relishing the way limbs hang out of the
monster's mouth after it eats up a victim, or the way the creature
stumbles and somersaults down an embankment, moving awkwardly on its
deformed limbs.
The human actors are, in their own way, equally
stylized and artificial. They approach their parts with a broad comedic,
satirical sensibility, purposefully over-emoting at every opportunity. A
demonstration of grief, following the monster's assault, is a
particularly good example, balanced as it is between devastating sadness
and ludicrous exaggeration. The family rolls around on the floor,
screaming and wrestling with one another, tearing at each other in grief
and rage, and Bong switches to an overhead shot that shows them
stretched out there on the ground, overcome by their feelings,
expressing their loss in this embarrassingly naked way. Later, Bong's
moments of political commentary are just as unfettered and raw; the film
is a pretty clever, if not particularly subtle, jab at American
dominance of international affairs, and the media's complicity in this
dominance. Here, the Americans created the monster through their blatant
lack of concern for the environment (especially the environments of the
other countries they visit for cheap labor), then they invent the scare
that the monster is causing a deadly disease, and then they insert
themselves into the affair by offering a radical "solution" in the form
of something called "Agent Yellow," a likely dangerous and carcinogenic
chemical that they plan to unleash in Korea to kill the monster. 
The film's guiding political concept is the
idea that American foreign policy is exploitative and misguided, that
the Americans oafishly cause problems and then make things even worse in
trying to solve them. In this case, the terror over the supposed
disease — which seems to have been made up through a combination of
incompetence and a desire to cover up mistakes — creates an artificial
panic that then allows the Americans to come in with a typically
over-the-top, violent solution. Moreover, the Americans are deaf to
concerns from other countries. In one of the film's most satirically
biting scenes, Gang-du is confronted by an American doctor who takes
Gang-du's insistence that his daughter is alive somewhere, imprisoned by
the monster, as evidence of dementia, a sign that the disease (which
he's starting to believe is fake, anyway) has taken over his brain.
Gang-du cries out, in anguish, that they never listen to him, that they
keep interrupting him and not letting him speak: "my words are words,
too," he cries. It might as well be the filmmaker speaking, on behalf of
all foreign peoples whose interests and concerns are trampled over by
an intrusive, profit-motivated, military-industrial America.
Although
this makes The Host sound like an unsubtle political screed,
there's much more to the film than that, and the politics are approached
with the same spirit of exaggeration and stylization as everything else
in the film. Bong mashes together various tones and ideas with abandon,
never settling into any one mode for long. The film's broad physical
comedy, political satire, horror and action thus rub uncomfortably
against one another, creating interesting frictions as multiple modes
can coexist even within a single scene. It's all leading towards an
action-packed climax in which this family, so divided and unhappy with
each other, finally comes together, each of them adding their specific
skills and qualities to the final confrontation with the monster. It
gets to the heart of the film's implicit message: rely on family and
community, ignoring the distractions and manipulations of politics. In
the final scene, they turn off the TV, shutting down the American
politicians using buzz words and euphemisms to absolve themselves of
responsibility, and focus on enjoying the simple pleasures of family
instead. It's a hard road to get to this point, though, through a lot of
blood and gore.
It's a wild ride for the audience, too, thrown
through the paces by Bong's free-wheeling sensibility of genre mash-ups.
There are stunning action sequences, silly comedic bits with lots of
slapstick falls and awkward chase scenes, moments of quiet family drama
during the uncharacteristic pauses in the action, and of course the
horror of the monster, who shows up every once in a while as though to
remind the viewer what kind of movie this is at heart, no matter how
many diversions into socio-political satire or absurdist comedy it takes
along the way. The monster's most horrifying moment comes late in the
film, when it suddenly stops simply slurping up victims and then
spitting them out more or less intact in its sewer hideout. Instead, it
vomits up a torrent of skulls and bones, the remains of its most recent
victims, a seemingly never-ending stream of bodies denuded of all signs
of flesh. It's all the more bracing and terrifying because Bong had
avoided making the monster too bloodthirsty in the earlier stretches of
the film.
In fact, there's something graceful about the monster,
something even kind of poignant. It often swings through the girders
beneath the bridge where it hides, doing gymnastic flips and swinging by
its tail, gracefully leaping from one beam to the next. In one scene,
its tail appears before it does, lazily turning in spiral patterns,
strangely beautiful and hypnotic until the ungainly monster, all
vicious-looking teeth and claws, comes careening out of the darkness.
Even the monster's ultimate end is somewhat sad, as the creatures twists
about in agony, wracked with pain, letting out a haunting cry as it
turns on its back. This moment represents the ultimate victory of the
family over its terror, but it's at the expense of this poor creature,
deformed and mutated by circumstances beyond its control, transformed
from an ordinary innocent sea creature into this monstrosity. Bong
allows this ambiguity, this discomfiting affection for the monster, to
linger throughout the final moments, preventing the obligatory defeat of
the creature from being as entirely triumphant as one would expect.
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