Mar 15 2009
Review: Gwoemul (The Host)
So yesterday was Friday the 13th and my wife, being the horror movie nerd she is, wanted to celebrate by watching something cheesy and scary. We looked around the ‘play it now’ list on Netflix and came across “The Host” which looked like it would fit the bill perfectly.
We were wrong. What we got was scary, yes, but far from cheesy. Now I have a new favorite monster movie.
The story begins when a US military doctor (Scott Wilson) orders a Korean subordinate (Brian Rhee) to dump an obscene amount of formaldehyde and other noxious liquids down the drain leading to the Han River. The Korean tries to protest, but the doctor gives the order. In a moment of monster movie science, all that formaldehyde somehow leads to a mutated amphibious creature living in the river.
The action begins when seemingly slow-witted man with narcolepsy Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) his father Hee-bong (Byeon Hee-bong) and his 13 year old daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-seong) have an encounter with the creature in front of the little snack stand that is both place of employment and home for the family. The monster is attacking everywhere, eating everyone, and creating chaos as monsters are want to do. In this chaos Gang-du grabs the wrong teenage girl’s hand and leaves Hyun-seo to be picked up by the monster. The monster doesn’t eat Hyun-seo; instead he grabs her by the tail and takes her away.
Everyone assumes that Hyun-seo is dead and her dad and granddad mourn her at a funereal where they are joined by Gang-du’s bronze medal winning archer sister Nam-joo (Bae Doona) and Nam-il (Park Hae-il) the college educated, foul mouthed, activist brother. Everyone who came into contact with the monster and anyone who came into contact with them have to go to the hospital for fear of virus. Gang-du is taken with considerable urgency as he had the creature’s blood on his face.
As the family wait in the hospital, Gang-du gets a phone call from Hyun-seo who is alive and hiding in a deep sewer where the creature is storing dead and dying bodies (for later consumption I assume). Gang-du and family try and get someone in authority to help, but no one listens to or cares about them. “You just aren’t that important” one military doctor tells them. They beg to differ and escape the quarantine hospital and proceed to try and rescue the trapped Hyun-seo.
At this point in the movie I was thinking: okay, better than I thought, and now it follows the standard “family comes together while overcoming odds and fighting a monster” plotline. I was wrong. This movie takes you on so many different rides that it redefines the whole concept of what a monster movie can be. I’m not talking twists and turns that are so often put into movies to try and trick people into liking it. I’m talking about the path from the beginning of the movie to the end treads on ground few have walked before and on the way we are treated to plot points that usually belong in movie genres that garner more respect than the monster flick. I found myself constantly amazed at what I was watching and how seamlessly it wove with everything else.
The only thing that kept this movie from being one of the all time greats is that it feels like it is a bit afraid to jump out of the cliché of monster movies altogether. It moves along at a good pace giving you wonderful things to look at and think about, and then it hits you with a shot or concept that is in every monster movie from “Cloverfield” to “Godzilla”, and not the good concepts either. These are few and far between, feeling almost like they were included as homage to the genera, but they hold it back.
Special notice should be given to the fact that this is a Korean film that we watched with subtitles. I don’t know how good the dub is, but I always recomend watching forigen films (with the exception of animation) with subtitles. Notice should also be given to the computer generated monster created by special effects team The Orphanage. The monster is amazingly detailed while not overly showy. You don’t think ‘there is a nicely rendered animated monster’ you think ‘holy dried squid, I’m having nightmares tonight’. 87%
I loved the creature. Wow, it was way more realistic that I expected. I especially loved that it was on ‘play it now’. That helped.
I’ll have to give kudos at work for suggesting this movie. ^^