Gwoemul (The Host), 2006. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, written by Joon-ho and Baek Chul-hyun and Ha Won-jun. Starring Song Kang-ho, Ko A-sung, Bae Doon-na, Park Hae-il, Byeon Hee-bong, the cockeyed Paul Lazar, and, as the voice of the beast, Oh Dal-su.
Now showing exclusively at the Uptown Theatre.
There’s a multitude of beasts in The Host, a new South Korean monster movie that has hit our shores with all the fanfare of, well, of a giant fish emerging from the Mississippi. Aside from the titular Host, predators include America, Chemicals, Technology, and others–probably dozens of others, small cultural references that elude those of us who don’t live in South Korea. As usual, man has created the creature: here, an anal-retentive American officer has ordered a poor, subservient Korean to dump bottles and bottles of formaldehyde down the drain, where it pours into the mighty Han river. Voila, the Host emerges, one that looks like a catfish, lopes like a greyhound, and pirouettes off bridges with the ease of a Brazilian cliff-diver. Frankly, the creature is beautiful. And in keeping with the tradition of the great monster movies the director, Bong Joon-ho, has made sure to show that the beast in question is as much a victim as the people he pursues for his nightly repast. It is possessed of a sense of dignity, and there is an understanding that, after all, he’s not a serial killer, but merely an animal. Sure, he eats people, but there’s no malice involved. Unlike The Host’s cinematic counterparts (like the meanies in Alien or last year’s Descent) we feel for both victim and killer.
After The Host’s explanatory prologue (the dumping of formaldehyde), we go to the pacific shores of the Han river, where we get to see our first monster, Gang-du (Song Kang-ho). Gang-du is a giant, a sleepy, hungry giant of a man, who can’t seem to wake up and peel his face off the candy bars he’s selling, and looks as if he’s going to stumble with every lumbering step. He works in a measly little snack stand with his hard-working father (Byeon Hee-bong), a weary man who’s raised his three kids after his wife abandoned the family. And what a family! Aside from the loafer, there’s Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na) who, unbelievably, is a professional archer with a tendency to pause before releasing her arrow, disqualifying her in a gold medal international competition, and leading us to wonder just how she’ll fare when she has to kill the big fish. Then there’s older brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il), an unemployed college graduate who is also an unrepentant drunk, frustrated that he cannot find work after studying for so long. Perhaps most incredibly, of the three it is Gang-du, the slob and bum, who has a child, Hyun-seo (Ko A-sung), a sharp little girl and the pride of the family.
One typical afternoon–typical being Gang-du and his father serving snacks to Seoul’s riverside picnickers–a giant fish swims around the murky waters of the Han. The people stop and stare and taunt the thing as it circles menacingly. Suddenly, in the periphery, the creature has leapt ashore and, again in typical monster movie fashion, sends great waves of people scrambling to flee from its hungry jaws.
This is an incredible scene, and the director shows off his considerable skills here alone. The live-action churning of the manic crowds like a great human tsunami, coupled with the special effects creature–at this point still a shock to behold–are breathtaking. I haven’t seen such manic choreography in years and years, if ever perhaps. Monsters chasing great crowds of people seem to be a specialty of Asian cinema, perfected, of course, with Godzilla, and something even Spielberg couldn’t capture in his awful Jurassic Park II. Parked cars, trailers, overpasses all become methods of escape and traps where the unfortunate meet their gruesome end. We are swept along in this tide, dually hoping for the escape of the heroes we’ve come to admire, and, really, trying to beat the next guy so that he–not us–will be the monster’s next meal.
In the confusion the little girl, Hyun-seo, is lost, carried away by the creature to its lair for later devouring. The Host then begins its long route through a variety of genres: government conspiracy (the creature is supposed to have a contagion, giving the Americans and Koreans the right to quarantine our heroes, and keep them from finding her), fairy tale (girl in the lair), comedy, drama, horror. But at its heart is a tale of a dysfunctional family brought together under trying circumstances involving both the beast and the government–so trying, in fact, that at times the film resembles less a creature feature than some sort of odd hybrid between Godzilla, Little Miss Sunshine and Brazil. As a friend put it (albeit about a theater production in town), the film is diffuse, spreading its horror, its humor and pathos, and even its character development around so thinly as director Joon-ho tries to cover everything plaguing Korea in its two hours.
Some of this works, some of it doesn’t, but what makes The Host narrowly miss being a classic of the genre is that the creature eventually loses its ability to frighten. Apparently the monster’s main weapon of destruction is picking people up with its long tail and smacking them on the sidewalk. We don’t need more blood necessarily, but we do need more thrills, less of the creature in the light, more people being swallowed, and something much more visceral than fatal concussions. Even the monster’s regurgitation of bones and trash lacks slime and blood. As the movie proceeds, Joon-ho then makes the error of taking his criticisms too seriously, and the film eventually begins to slow down considerably.
But The Host is beautifully directed, well acted, and worth seeing–were it only playing a couple of months later at our local drive-ins! No, The Host is art-house fare, and our suburban and country cousins will have to settle for garbage like Dead Silent instead. And that’s worse than monsters popping out of the Mississippi if you ask me.
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