The Host (D-)

This is one of the dumbest films I’ve seen. There is no logic, sense, or coherency to anything the characters do, both morally and practically. That also applies to the filmmakers.
In the near future, the Earth has been conquered by aliens that take control of people’s minds. Melanie Stryder was one of the last remaining humans. She was journeying to a safe haven in the middle of the desert with her kid brother and an expressionless wooden block, otherwise known as her boyfriend Jared. We, the audience, see Melanie really loved Jared because they kiss in the rain in slow motion. Ripped right out of The Notebook. Or Dear John. Or every Nicholas Sparks movie ever.

Anyway, Melanie is cornered by the aliens, and jumps through a glass window on the fourth floor to lead them away from her brother. An alien policeman who’s job is to track down people, named Seeker because what else would she be named, says that even though Melanie has “barely a bone not broken” she survived because she has a will to live. Apparently people who fall through glass windows and then drop four stories and then die are just whimps, because willpower totally trumps all that. Seeker heals Melanie and then infects her with an alien, named Wanderer. However, Melanie has strong willpower so she ends up still alive in Wanderer’s head, and can even control her body sometimes. After some events that make literally no sense and cannot be explained, Wanderer and Melanie end up escaping the alien utopia and go live in a cave in the desert with a small band of human survivors. But then Wanderer falls in love with a guy named Ian, which upsets Malanie because she likes Jared. As if there is a difference: Neither of them have any character traits, and they even look the same.

The Host is based on a book written by Stephenie Meyer, who also wrote the Twilight series. It would be easy to blame this train wreck of a film on her, but I don’t think that is entirely fair. Apparently, the book covers who Wanderer is and what makes Earthlings different hosts from everyone else (“she” is several hundred years old and, in theory, genderless). Also, it explains why Wanderer and Melanie team up, as most of the book is internal conversations between the two (or so I’ve heard).
None of this ends up in the movie. We learn nothing about what Wanderer and her race are like. Since the alien civilization apparently has no wars, famine, violence, or even lying, you would think the aliens might be a little different from humans. Not in the movie. Wanderer says she is a 200+ year old unisex alien, but she acts just like her teenage girl host. And she lies and punches things a lot, so obviously her race doesn’t really have a problem with all that.

The internal conversations are probably the film’s biggest flaw. This is something that is pretty easy to do in a book but near impossible in a film. Saoirse Ronan (who plays Melanie/Wanderer)’s readings of the voice over-work for Melanie are cringe-worthingly bad. It doesn’t sound anything like Melanie did before she got infected. Also, the director added some sound “enhancements” to distinguish it from the voice of Wanderer. I guess it distinguishes it, in that is sounds utterly ridiculous. It is impossible not to laugh when you hear these conversations, which is a problem because most of the movie is them (mostly while the camera pans over meaningless landscape shots). And it sure doesn’t help that the actual dialogue (what was written in the script) is rock-bottom terrible. Hollywood’s interpretation of Meyer’s vampire sparkle was not as dumb or unintentionally comedic as the Melanie voiceover.
The rest of the acting is terrible as well, with the exception of William Hurt as Melanie’s uncle, who is competent. Ian and Jared, played respectively by Jake Abel (the evil teenager in Percy Jackson) and Max Irons (Red Riding Hood), have no expressions whatsoever, which matches their characters, which have no traits whatsoever. Diane Kruger, who is generally a good actress, is awful here as the Seeker. I’m guessing that the actors should not be blamed as much as Director Andrew Niccol, since the odds of them all giving such terrible performances in the same movie when not following terrible directions is near zero.

Nicchol, who also was the sole writer on the screenplay, made two dystopian future sci-fi films before: Gattaca and In Time. Both were well-made and had exciting action, so I don’t get what happened here. Everything he does, except for the cool production design he did with Beat Frutiger (JJ Abram’s Star Trek), is atrocious. All the action scenes are done to a very slow, very soft score that completely drains any sense of tension. The eyes of people infected by the alien are supposed to glow white (the people hide this by wearing sunglasses, which the aliens are too dumb to find suspicious). In some scenes, the whiteness is very pronounced, but in others it is practically non-existant, because it would be distracting. Of course it is more distracting to see such a pivotal part of the plot be so inconsistent.
The plot is full of giant holes. Why do the aliens, who are said to be a species that can find a host on any planet with life, choose to inhabit people instead of, say, cats? Are they really genderless? How do the human characters get from their hidden fortress in a butte in the middle of a desert to the city without being scene? How is this idiotic story stretched to an excruciating runtime of over two freaking hours? Even the central plot of the film--the romance--makes no sense. It is presented as a love triangle, but it really isn’t. Melanie likes Jared but Wanderer likes Ian. They said in the first five minutes that aliens can leave one host to inhabit another, so we all know that this can simply be solved when Wanderer switches to another body. Why are they at each others throats like characters in Mean Girls competing over which guy to get?

The film’s final twenty minutes end up going in a shockingly offensive moral direction, where right after a laughably shallow explanation by Wanderer of how humans should learn violence is not as effective as kindness (because nothing in this movie is ever shown, it is explicitly stated with bad monologues), Wanderer says that she is going to commit suicide because she doesn’t want to take over another human but can’t imagine returning to her home planet without the guy she loves. This sends Melanie on a quest to find out how she can give Wanderer a way to stay on Earth with Ian. Not how Wanderer should learn that suicide is never something that should be considered. The movie just flat out accepts that with her only alternative being living in a world without Ian, Wanderer’s suicide is really the only option that would make sense.
This movie is stupid in every way a movie has ever been stupid, and then it invents new ways to be even more stupid. And it made me stupid by tricking me into paying to see it.