The Host (review)

Released in South Korea in late July 2006, The Host became the top box-office draw of the year. It was released across the Asia region – Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan – in September 2006, and then in the UK in November 2006 and the US in March 2007. Although the movie would not be recognised as a blockbuster by UK or US audiences, the scale of its budget and box-office revenues testify to its status as such in South Korea and it certainly exhibits numerous aspects of domestic Korean blockbuster cinema. It is a high-concept movie (a monster appears at the Han River in Seoul). It generated much hype, for example, around the lengthy period and sizeable budget spent on creating the monster, its world-premier screening at Cannes, its wide-release and its record opening-week box-office takings. It also draws upon the fame and popularity of director Bong, whose previous movie, Salin-ui chueok/Memories of Murder (South Korea 2003), was the top South Korean box-office hit of 2003. Finally, the movie is designed to offer multiple entry points so as to attract a range of audiences. While still appealing to domestic audiences as a big-budget monster movie, it appeals to audiences beyond Asia as art-house (or cult movie) fare containing comic political satire. In managing to achieve all of this, The Host generates numerous instances of slippage.

The Korean title of The Host is Goemul, which in Korean means ‘monster’ – thus declaring itself first and foremost to be a monster movie. As a genre, the monster movie evolved out of the realm of the Hollywood B-movie into one of the main types of Hollywood blockbuster. The outstanding cousin of the American monster movie is Japanese kaiju movies, influenced by King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack US 1933) and initiated by Gojira (Honda Japan 1954). While international audiences may be less familiar with Korean monsters than with their Japanese counterparts, The Host is not the first Korean monster movie. Daegoesu Yongari/Monster Yonggary (Kim South Korea/Japan 1967) was born as a Korean copy-cat version of Gojira and revived as Yonggari/Yonggary (Shim South Korea 1999) and 2001 Yonggari/2001 Yonggary (Shim South Korea 2000).² More recently, the director of the Yonggary series brought to cinematic life Imugi – a monster of numerous legendary stories – in D-War (Shim South Korea 2007), the most expensive South Korean movie to date.

It is hard to ignore the challenges faced by filmmakers seeking to impress audiences familiar with the world’s biggest and most famous monsters. In this context, it is noticeable that The Host presents an ugly and not-so-overwhelming, indeed rather diminutive, monster possessed of speedy movements resembling those of a gymnast. Moreover, unlike Jaws (Spielberg US 1975) or Gojira, this ominous and cruel but not entirely frightening monster unveils its entire shape and size to the public relatively soon after the movie begins. This particular monster does not create any intense sense of suspense or stimulate any wild imaginings; instead, after being very quickly seen, the monster simply slips away from being the narrative’s focal point of attraction and obsession. After its first messy attack, it yields its position of narrative centrality to a motherless family and to a non-existent virus. It first swallows a 13-year-old girl, Hyeonseo (Ko Ah-sung), and then unwittingly throws her up alive, leading her family members to attempt to rescue her while the police, who believe them to be infected by the virus, pursue them. A collection of social misfits and mentally ‘immature adult children’ (Dargis), the family members proceed to chase and fight with the monster.

The movie slips in generic terms from being a monster movie to being a family action movie and a political satire. In the first Gojira movie, the awakening of Gojira is directly attributed to the effects of real-life US testing of an atomic...