The Host is a terrible movie. Plain and simple. And this is coming from a fan of the book, so here is my less-biased review.
First off, my background: I love the book. Love, love, LOVE it. It is not without its flaws. I am well-aware of that. But I will defend this book to the grave. I am currently a 24-year-old girl in university, and when this book first came out, this is where I stood on Twilight and Stephenie Meyer: meh.
Allow me to elaborate. I knew they weren’t great works of literature, but they gave me exactly what I wanted: a two-hour at a time escape about a girl and her fantasy-creature lovers. They were fluffy beach reads – not masterpieces, but I appreciated them for what they were. When The Host came out, my friends and I decided to give it a try.
Out of everyone I know, exactly two of us made it the whole way through. Flaw #1 was that the first 150 pages or so are so tedious and full of overly long prose that many saw no reason to slog through the remaining 500 pages. This is a book that definitely could have used another edit or two.
Once you got past that, I found that Meyer had a way of sucking you in. This wasn’t a love story – yes, there is definitely a love story in it, but this was more than just simply “a girl has to pick between two guys.” This was more of a story about identity and what makes a person attracted to another person. Is it biological? Chemical? Physical? Can you be attracted to a soul, regardless of the body it’s in? And of course, there are sci-fi elements of aliens, rebellion, fighting and deception included.
When I first heard that this movie was being released, I was excited… but also terrified. How were they going to pull this off? The first full-length trailer had me hooked. When she throws herself out the window, and Imagine Dragons “Radioactive” picks up and hits the chorus? OH MAN, I was fan-girling like the crazy rabid fangirls my friends and I mock. It was embarrassing.
I was a big fan of Saoirse Ronan’s, and I thought if anyone could make this movie work, it would be her. Andrew Nichol has directed some pretty legit movies such as The Truman Show and Gattaca. These were not one-trick ponies.
But as I saw more and more TV spots focusing on the love angle, heard more and more of the bad dialogue – which in text works well enough, but aloud just sounds ridiculous – I got terrified. I knew that this was going to come out all wrong.
And it did. They tried too hard to fit it into the Twilight-mode. This was not meant to be “Twilight with aliens.” I have never been so flabbergasted when seeing a movie.
The dialogue was laughable, the score was inappropriate, the acting was stilted, and there was no sense of timing. Did this movie take place in a week? A month? The actions and motivations of the characters were questionable and out of the blue, because there was no time given to develop them. One moment everyone wants to kill Wanda/Mel, the next they don’t. They shoot at bulletproof helicopters – why?
In the books, so much time passes. When we meet Melanie, it’s been three years since the aliens invaded. After she gets captured, it’s almost another year after that before she finds her family. And from there, they spend months together before the climax of the film. There is a sense of gravity to the situations.
This book was Stephenie Meyer’s attempt at writing an adult novel – Melanie is 21 and Jared is 29. These are mature, adult characters. Unfortunately their ages are the only adult things about this novel. It’s still written very much like a young adult novel, and the movie plays very cliché. Honestly, the movie is simply “Twilight with aliens.”
Special mentions do go out to Saoirse Ronan and William Hurt. Ronan had the difficult task of portraying both Melanie and Wanda, and she did amazingly with what she was given. Sadly, the script gives her some pretty ridiculous things to perform and say. Hurt plays Melanie’s crazy Uncle Jeb, and he’s almost the only source of intentional laughs – all other laughs you get out of this movie will be unintentional.
So while I don’t like how the official Hypable review has been written, I have to agree. Overall, The Host was a terrible movie and a disappointment to fans, as far as I’m concerned. Hopefully readers will find this review slightly less biased and find my reasonings more valid.
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