"We may be witnessing a Biblical prophecy come true - the beasts will reign over the earth."
-- Dr. Harold Medford from Them!
Bong Joon-ho made The Host for me. He might have thought he was making it for himself, but let us be very clear he made the finest monster film in quite some time. Not since the original Gojira and other early Toho Kaiju films has there been such a reason to celebrate. I give you Jurassic Park, but the American remake of Godzilla is not only bad, but insulting to the mighty reptile. I was going to save this for another blog, but this film has been a long time coming. Bong Joon-ho made Memories of Murder and that was good enough, but that film cannot begin to prepare you for the perfection that is The Host. The two most dangerous books in Western Civilization are Catastrophe: The End of Cinema? and APE: Monster of the Movies by David Annan. I cannot begin to describe the impact of these books that were purchased at a Brentano’s that no longer exists in Chevy Chase, Maryland back around 1975. It all starts with those books. Between those two books, it is all in there. Godzilla, King Kong, Things To Come, Planet Of The Apes, Soylent Green, Them!, Gappa, The Beginning Of the End, The Day The Earth Stood Still and so many others. In Catastrophe, you get Weekend, Alphaville, Roma and other art house films to boot. The books were like a prophecy of demented cinematic bliss. The obsession comes from there. The seeds are planted with loads of images. The love of the monster film starts before these books, but the deal is sealed forever with their purchase. I joked with my Mom earlier this week about these books and how dangerous they turned out to be. She told me I was nuts. She would have bought more of them, if she knew of their true impact.
So what does all this have to do with The Host and the brilliance of South Korean Cinema? The Host is only the latest in a series of films from South Korea that are truly pushing the envelope. Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, 3-Iron, The Quiet Family, Shiri, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, Memories Of Murder, The President's Last Bang, Joint Security Area and A Tale Of Two Sisters are just a few of the films that have put Korean cinema on the map and made it such a powerful contribution to world cinema. Chan-wook Park's Oldboy made a vivid impression and the hype building up on the internet before it came out drove me insane. I just wanted to see it. I had seen Park's Joint Security Area years before, and was very impressed by it. But Oldboy is one of those Memento moments that sears in your brain and never leaves. Park became an icon by the end of the notorious hammer corridor fight. Korean cinema cane be seen as extreme and its directors push things to edge. Genres are meant to be put in the blender. Rules are meant to be broken. Conventions are meant to be shattered. I do not even think a Japanese director could get away with it, but your Chan-wook Park's and Bong Joon-ho's do not care about rules. They care about telling stories.
The Host is a monster movie, political satire, sheer lunacy and the ultimate in dysfunctional family dynamics. Think Little Miss Sunshine, Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster, Jaws, Alien, and either version of The Blob all mixed together.
And the film has such an original tone of its own because while it may share some of things from those films, it never wants to be just like them. It pushes the boundaries to a point where you know that you are witnessing the creation of something new and wonderful. Our monster movie begins as a United States military scientist played by Scott Wilson orders a Korean technician (Kim Hak-sun) to dump lots of formal Hyde down the sink several years ago. All because the bottle have dust on them. The formal Hyde goes into the Han River and over the years a great mutant beast has been growing. Cut to the present and we have a mutant tadpole that begins comes out the Han River to terrorize the streets of Seoul. This tadpole has a tale as lethal as Godzilla's. A mutant born of American military might and carelessness.
It is just a normal day for the Park family and their snack bar along the Han River. The Parks make the Hoovers of Little Miss Sunshine seem rather normal. That is quite a thing to pull off. We have the grandfather, Hee-Bong (Byun Hee-bong) and his three adult children: the unemployed white collar worker, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), his archery champion sister, Nam-joo (Bae Doo-na) and the their slacker man-child brother, Gang-du (Song Kang-ho). It is Hee-Bong's granddaughter, Hyun-seo (Ko A-sung) who has her act together. She is all that! She is Gang-du's daughter. He protects her and loves her very much. Gang-du is going out of the snack bar to get some beverages and notices that a lot of people are staring at something hanging from underneath a bridge. It is the monster. No one knows what to make of it. Than it jumps into the river and disappears. Than from behind Gang-du we see people falling into the river and running. The creature is on land. Imagine if Jaws could come on the land. It is a scene of absolute shivering terror. The tadpole can come on land. Meanwhile, Hyun-seo is out and about. Everyone is running and she gets caught up, but Gang-du grabs her as the monster is running toward them. But it is not enough, the monster has taken her. He has grabbed on to the wrong little girl. Has she been devoured by the creature? We think so until a cell phone call is received by her. She is being kept in the monster’s sewer home. How the hell can she get service from the sewer when I cannot even get it from inside most buildings? The family must combine forces to find Hyun-seo because the government, military and police will not help them.
Hyun-seo must have been separated at birth from Ivana Baquero's Ofelia in Pan's Labyrinth. Hyun-seo is the epitome of bravery and resourcefulness. She outwits the monster, by playing dead and trying to find ways to get out while it is gone. The creature swallows its victims and than spits them out to eat later. The sewer is a pit full of skulls and bones of previous victims. The family meanwhile has been forced into a quarantine station with many others from the Han River incident. They manage to escape and become enemies of the state. The government and the United States military claim there is a disease associated with the monster that some of the victims may have. This is a metaphor fro SARS and Avian Bird Flu. Is the government lying? Clearly, Bong does not favor the American military presence in his country. We are the ugly Americans in this film. But authority in general is not portrayed in favorable light. The Park Family must fight with each other, their fellow citizens, and the government and finally deal with the dreaded beast. Their quest to find Hyun-seo is one of last year's best chases in a long time. Each of them will endure the worst possible ordeals to find Hyun-seo.
While Mr. Bong takes the best of old science fiction and horror films that were created out of the Atomic Age, he has done something more remarkable. While the later Godzilla films attempted to tackle the environmental issues in the later films of the first series and the second series of the 1980's and 1990's, they never came off more than high camp. The second series did this a little better, but the Toho was more interested in destroying continuity more than anything else. No other series in the history of pop culture has been re-invented more than the Godzilla films. The Host is a cautionary tale of about the cost of human error and the survival of our planet. The Host is a warning of the true shape of things to come if we do not get our act together.
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