Film Review: The Host

Science fiction and (Stephanie Meyer’s favorite) love triangles come together to create a very long two hours with The Host. As human bodies are taken over by alien souls, their eyes turn blue, and the audience’s eyes roll—both back in their heads as they fall asleep and from side to side as the protagonist and uninspired “hot guy number one” make out in the rain for the second time.

As compared with the Twilight franchise, this film isn’t brought down by Kristen Stewart’s attempt at acting or an inexperienced director’s love affair with close-ups; this is just a bad story. Uncannily similar to the already twice-remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Host shows the un-epic battle between the dwindling human resistance and the alien invasion. This foreign species takes over human host bodies, but main-character Melanie (Saiorse Ronan) won’t surrender her body without a fight, and her spirit remains, cohabitating the body with the alien soul.

What this means for the moviegoer is lots of voice-over—snarky teenage girl voice-over that’s not funny and more importantly not necessary. There have been plenty of movies that successfully capture a character with “voices in her head,” but this movie didn’t pull it off. The tension her split personality creates is meant to be the focus, but the interpersonal struggle isn’t compelling or dramatic. To amp up the stakes, there’s the Seeker (Diane Kruger) who’s hunting everyone down, but even this outside threat portrayed by a talented actress can’t save this too-slowly-sinking ship.

I’ve seen all the Twilight movies and I go to every Nicholas Sparks adaptation. I am not anti-chick-flick, but The Host isn’t even so bad that it’s good. What’s worse is that this isn’t some fundamentally flawed cast and the story’s not missing a crucial plot point. Even as these words make their way onto the page, it just becomes more apparent that there is nothing to say. The movie is just boring. An hour in, I Googled the runtime to see how much more I was in for. The theater was silent all the way through. No laughs. No gasps. Just the sound of a girl talking…to herself.