dir: Bong Joon-ho
[img_assist|nid=834|title=The Host|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=444]
It’s been a while since there’s been a decent creature feature. When was the last semi-decent flick where a monster takes on a city and the city loses, at least for a while? Godzilla’s the granddaddy, Jaws was the red-headed stepson, but most monster flicks are just crappy clones and we all know it.
I guess King Kong qualifies, but that bloated morass wore out its welcome with me a long time ago. Three bloody hours of monkey love is barely enough. That he released an extended director’s cut is the final insult. Was anyone craving another 45 minutes of that film? Do you remember anyone saying to you, “yeah, Kong was okay, but it really needed another hour or so to be really great”?
If they did, feel free to punch them in the throat for me. It’s okay. I’ll take the blame. I have ever so broad shoulders.
The Host is a decent enough monster flick, but people are really going berserker over it, I think, because it’s Korean. If this flick came out in the States, which it will, since it’s been snapped up for a remake already, it would go straight to video. Of course when Universal remakes it’ll be for 50 times the budget and will star Tom Cruise. Tom Bloody Cruise, you bastards.
This is the biggest box office hit in Korean history, but it looks like just another monster flick to the rest of us cynical xenophobes. If there is something that differentiates it from every other monster snake, alien, mutant run amuck flick that pollutes the shelves of your local DVD store, it’s that it’s uniquely Korean (in that much of the humour doesn’t translate), and it maintains a good balance between the monsterific action and the unfolding family drama.
Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) is a bit of a simpleton. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just not very bright, unlike his dyed blonde hair. He also has difficulty staying awake most of the time as he is supposed to man the counter at his family’s kiosk on the banks of the Han River. He lives in cramped circumstances with his dad (Byeon Hie-bong) and his daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung). He also has an alcoholic ex-radical brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il) and an athlete sister Nam-joo, who’s a wiz with the bow and arrow.
Before the family can dazzle us with their idiosyncratic ways and quirky dynamics, we see a scene, based on an actual event called the McFarland Incident, where a US military guy orders a Korean lackey to pour a large quantity of formaldehyde down a drain that empties into the Han River, completely oblivious to the teratogenic properties of the evil substance.
So that you don’t have to rush to a dictionary, I’ll tell you for free that ‘teratogenic’ means ‘making monsters’. Whilst that first part may have actually happened, what follows didn’t happen. Probably.
Various Koreans who use the river for their fishing and suicide needs notice, over the course of six years, some strange creature lurking under the water of the Han. But it is on one fateful day in 2006 that the true horror of that environmental catastrophe bears fruit, when a giant amphibian – lizard – squid thing climbs out of the lake and starts eating people.
Now, even the people who are rabid boosters for this film can only really honestly say that the monster in question looks “all right” or “okay”. For a CGI beastie, it looks okay. It suffers from the weightlessness that makes most CGI creatures look literally unreal, but it doesn’t really matter. The shark in Jaws didn’t look at all convincing, but that flick worked superbly.
Of course that was because of the John Williams music that made at least two generations of people shit themselves every time they heard it, but no matter. The Host doesn’t have a scary tune that I can remember, but it does get the family involved in a way most monster flicks don’t bother with.
When the creature goes on its rampage, it snatches Gang-du’s daughter Hyun-seo, and stashes her in a kind of larder it maintains for when it gets peckish in the middle of the night. Gang-du’s family then does its darndest to track Hyun-seo down to save her.
The family get separated and pick up bits of information to help them find her, but they each have particular qualities or weaknesses that aid or impede them in their mission. As family dynamics go, theirs isn’t too idiosyncratic or commonplace, but you wonder how they’re going to get there in the end.
Coupled with this search for Hyun-seo is this strangely political sub-plot about both the Korean and US Governments getting involved because the monster carries a virus, and everyone who comes in contact with it is seen as a risk. I won’t spoil how that all eventuates, but I won’t pretend that I really understood what was going on there either.
It’s fairly entertaining stuff. I enjoyed watching it, and, more than anything, I’m surprised that this flick was screening at a multiplex and at the arthouse cinemas here locally. As a creature feature, it’s not too bad, but for me at least the most interesting aspect is the constant references to political activism in the family’s fight against the creature.
After the Korean War, where North and South Korea were divided into happy little vassal states of greater powers, South Korea wasn’t the democracy that some textbooks might indicate. It was pretty much a dictatorship for many decades. Of course its citizens had it much better than the starving ones over the border, but there was still a lot of tension between the citizenry and its government.
This lead to a generation of protesters and activists far tougher than your average seller of the Green Left Weekly, or the idealistic young/old souls manning the card table asking for you to sign a petition in order to compel whatever politician to withdraw troops from wherever. South Korean protesters would routinely be killed during their protests. There’s footage of your average protest which made Tiananmen Square look like a school excursion. It wasn’t until around the late 80s when things improved.
The imagery and iconography still obviously has resonance with Koreans, which is why the film is replete with the imagery of violent protest. When the family takes on the monster, quite often the techniques and tactics they use look suspiciously like the kinds of actions a group of hardcore uni students would take to take down a different kind of beast. It’s not a coincidence, either. Street signs turned into spears, paving stones torn up with specialist tools and launched as missiles, Molotov cocktails artfully thrown, these has a slightly different tinge to them in this context.
There’s action, there’s drama, there’s slapstick comedy, there’s family members fighting endlessly about old family stuff, and there’s kids in peril. Everything coheres into a reasonable enough film, and it has a pretty strong ending for a film of this type. I guarantee that when the film is remade in the States, there’s no way they’re going to keep that ending. But it is very Korean, something which non-Korean viewers who’ve seen a few of the flicks thrown up by the surge in their cinema’s popularity would get. It's not an insult.
As for the acting, well, eh, you don’t watch a monster flick for Sir Lawrence Olivier and Dame Judi Dench. I would categorise most of the acting as overacting except when it’s underacting. Two of the main characters barely speak at all, which is probably good for business. And that monster just doesn’t know when to quit with its slavering and bellowing.
It might not be the brightest or brainiest thing I’ve seen this year, but at least it kept me out of trouble for about two hours. It does show that it’s possible to make entertaining creature features for a tenth of the budget and without the embarrassment endemic to most of their Hollywood counterparts. I’m not sure why this flick is making people go berserk, because I don’t think it’s the fourteenth coming of Godzilla, nor do I think it’s a masterpiece just because it’s Korean. But it’s still pretty well done. The socio-political aspects and family stuff connects decently with the well-handled action, which is why it ultimately works for me
And people get chewed up real good, which is always a bonus.
7 times you’d think a guy who’d just had brain surgery would at least had a headache out of 10
--
“The Han River is broad, why can’t you be broad-minded?” – that’s a convincing argument, The Host.
- 2970 reads