2013's Most Anticipated: The Host

The Host (PG-13) - Runtime: 125 minutes
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Diane Kruger, Max Irons
Director: Andrew Niccol
Writer: Andrew Niccol

I think I've officially written off Andrew Niccol as a one-hit wonder. Gattaca was his brilliant writing and directing debut, but since then he's had some promising movies that just didn't seem to fully realize their potential (Lord of War, In Time). With The Host, the trailer made me hope that I was going to be wrong - it had an intriguing premise and I really love the cast (at least, Ronan and Kruger - I have no idea who those douchey guys are on the poster). But you know what? Stephanie Meyer wrote the book the movie is based on and that should have been fair warning for me. So Niccol isn't entirely at fault here, because you can only do so much to a film with such a flimsy foundation.

If you haven't guess already, I loathed The Host. It was boring, cliched and completely stupid. I laughed a lot during all the serious scenes (well, I guess I enjoyed it from that perspective!). A brief synopsis - the world has been taken over by aliens who wander from planet to planet, taking over the bodies of the native species. Pretty much everyone is a host to these creatures and there is a few packets of human resistance. Melanie is one of these survivors who ends up getting caught and becoming a host to an alien named Wanderer. Which is a dumb name in and of itself, but the movie decides that Wanderer doesn't really roll of the tongue well, so everyone starts to call her Wanda. And all I could think of is Jamie Foxx's character from In Living Color:

Heeeeyyyyy!

And this wasn't the worst thing in the movie. NO. The worst part about this movie was the inner dialogue Wanda and Melanie have. A lot of the time Melanie's voice is talking while Wanda just stares blankly around. It's about as dumb as it sounds. And for the most part, Melanie is just shouting "No! Don't do that!" or "Stop talking to that boy!" It becomes grating to the point where Maggie asked if we could stop the movie and not finish it. I told her no, because A) I am the man in this relationship and she'll have to just do whatever I say and B) I didn't realize we still had AN HOUR AND A HALF TO GO BECAUSE I AM AN IDIOT. Frankly, she should have just slapped me across the face which would have been a better ending to the movie than what followed.

So the movie just meanders about, moving so slow that the tumbleweeds in the movie become literal metaphors for the pacing. And then when Wanda/Melanie end up finding the human outpost in the middle of nowhere, dumbass Wanda has to fall in love (apparently us humans are feisty creatures and all of these aliens haven't felt love before? I don't know, it's all kind of a blur). And as soon as you realize what's happening it all becomes such a big joke. Seriously, only Stephanie Meyer could come up with this bullshit - a weird love quadrangle where the alien Wanda loves a boy from the human resistance while Melanie still is in love with her boyfriend from before her capture.

It's all really pointless - there's no real emotional core to the story. The characters are all fairly flat and the dialogue is comical. I pretty much hated this movie. I would best avoid this one at all costs.

Rating: Avoid Like the Plague!