Hand it to a developing country on the global periphery like south Korea to give birth to a monster movie willing to shake things up in the world of genre. Fun, funny and fiercely political, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is his third film, and the second that I’ve seen following 2003’s Memories of Murder. Both are firmly genre films, with a serial killer in Memories of Murder, and a giant monster in The Host. The Host’s unique mix of pathos and bathos is immediately recognizable from Memories of Murder, as is the strong anti-government satire. Where The Host is different, however, is in it’s a setting in the present, a shift of its critique of the State from the fear of emasculation to the fear of public crisis, and a slightly Spielbergian devotion to the family unit.
Unlike the standard established by Spielberg in Jaws, the monster in The Host – a giant skull-chewing CGI tadpole – is revealed very quickly: a river gets polluted and this big green jumping out of it. Bong’s intention seems to be to establish the premise and get it out of the way as soon as possible. The ensuing film, aside from a few choice chase scenes and a firy climax, is not even about a giant tadpole so much as it is a farce aimed at the State’s ability to declare a crisis without having a clue about what’s really going on. When the Korean government – and its overpowering overseer, the United States – declare the tadpole to be a SARS-like virus, it’s up to the intrepid, devoted family to navigate the real situation and resolve it on their terms.
As Karl mentions below, Little Miss Sunshine was last year’s other film about family dysfunction. Like Lil’ Miss, we get a host of idiosyncratic characters: there’s the central cute little girl, her unemployed college graduate father, an aging-old grandpa who runs a snack stand, a lazy uncle whose shifts at the stand double as naptime, and a professional archer aunt. While The Host is cute at times, unlike Lil’ Miss there’s nothing precious about it, largely thanks to the greater social and political weight on its shoulders. Unlike the traffic stop cop in Lil’ Miss, for instance, the State isn’t there simply as a set-up for a joke; in The Host, it’s there to perform its true function, to repress.
While Lil’ Miss was the more popular film of the two in the States, The Host became the top grossing film of all time in Korea. While one doesn’t have to know anything about Korea to enjoy the film, it might take some knowledge of the country to appreciate it. When the dad demonstrates his college degree was in molotov tossing, for example, it helps to know he’s part of a generation of students who helped throw out the country’s dictatorship. Apparently The Host is slated for a remake in the States, and it’ll be interesting to see if Hollywood does anything with these political details.
