"The Host (Gwoemul)" - an old fashioned monster movie with big budget effects from Korean director Bong Joon-ho - starts off with a reverent homage to monster movies of old. An evil (American) morgue technician orders his hapless (Korean) assistant to pour gallons of toxic chemicals down the drain, polluting the Han River. A scant six years later, something horrific appears from the river's depths to wreck havoc on downtown Seoul. Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) - a perpetually sleepy single-father working at the family food-stand - witnesses the monster's first appearance, as it makes mincemeat of unsuspecting riverside revelers. No sooner does Gang-du spring into action than the monster snatches his young daughter before his eyes and disappears into the watery depths.
Here the director makes a bold decision. Abandoning the well-worn post-"Jaws" technique of keeping the monster out of sight and, therefore, letting the audience fill in the blanks, Mr. Bong stages this exceptional opening attack in broad daylight, displaying the beast in all its CGI glory. While I respected this daring choice, it falls short of the desired effect, mostly because the monster itself isn't all that exciting. Boasting an impressive pedigree with visual effects by Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop in partnership with The Orphanage (
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"), the beast - an unholy mixture of a tadpole and one of those sandworms from "Dune" - is far too CGI-y to be truly menacing. And, surprisingly, in certain scenes the creature doesn't appear to share the same physical space as the actors. This is not the best work from either production company; it feels instead like something done in spare time (unfortunate comparisons to 1997's Guillermo del Toro vehicle "Mimic" are likely).
By turns tragic and broadly comic, the majority of the film is a frantic and frustrating chase to rescue Gang-du's daughter from the beast's oily clutches. Along the way, the script by Mr. Bong, along with Baek Chul-hyun and Ha Won-jun, has something to say about the government - both Korean and American - as well as its fair share of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering to do.
Like its ravenous beastie, "The Host" is a strange hybrid. A mixture of Eastern themes and Western budgets, the film never buckles down and commits to being the monster movie that it is (the standard "the authorities won't listen" scenes are firmly in place, as well as some convenient, and all too easy, escapes). While the actors attempt to keep the suspense high, the film's aggressively uneven tone distracts from the proceedings once too often. The ending, finally, goes on for far too long and, like the rest of the film, attempts to be too much to too many.
