Genre: Sci-Fi, Suspense, Horror, Drama
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Hie-bong Byeon, Hae-il Park, Bae Doo-na, Ko Ah-seong
Release year: 2006
Language: Korean
Subtitle: English (Hard Sub)
SYNOPSIS:
Gang-du is a dim-witted man working at his father's tiny snack bar near the Han River. One day, Gang-du's one and only daughter Hyun-seo comes back from school irritated. She is angry at her uncle, Nam-il, who visited her school as her guardian shamelessly drunk. Ignoring her father's excuses for Nam-il, Hyun-seo is soon engrossed in her aunt Nam-joo's archery tournament on TV. Meanwhile, outside of the snack bar, people are fascinated by an unidentified object hanging onto a bridge. In an instant, the object reveals itself as a terrifying creature turning the riverbank into a gruesome sea of blood¡¦ Amid the chaos, Hyun-seo is helplessly snatched up by the creature right before Gang-du's eyes. These unforeseen circumstances render the government powerless to act. But receiving a call of help from Hyun-seo, the once-ordinary citizen Gang-du and his family are thrust into a battle with the monster to rescue their beloved Hyun-seo.
RATING: 10/10
USER RATING:
REVIEW:
" It's hard to write about Bong Joon-ho's The Host (the original Korean title is "Creature") without inserting puns on the word "monster." The temptation arises not only because of the subject matter, but because everything about the film -- its scale, its budget, its record-breaking performance at the box office, its overseas potential -- is huge within the context of the local film industry. It is a monster movie -- about a truck-sized mutant that crawls out of the Han River and unleashes terror upon the citizens of Seoul -- and yet, it is not one. Part of The Host's appeal is that its core concerns are somewhat slippery, and hard to pinpoint.
The Host You could just as well call The Host a family movie. Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) is the owner of a small food stand in the Han River Citizen's Park, selling squid, candy and beer to people who have come out to enjoy the sun. Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) is one of his three children, a man who seems a bit slow mentally and whose one motivating strength is a devotion to his schoolage daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung). Rounding out the family is Nam-joo (Bae Doona), an amateur competitive archer and her brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il), a former student radical who at present is drunk and unemployed. There are no mothers in the family -- Hee-bong's wife having passed on and Gang-du's having run away. It's a dysfunctional group, held together only by the crisis that faces them, and yet the family dynamics will feel familiar to many viewers.
It is when the creature snatches the young Hyun-seo that the family becomes aligned against this unknown biological threat. However, in what is perhaps a telling reflection of our times, the family ends up spending more time battling health professionals, military personnel, and other manifestations of the government than the beast itself. The Host mixes more than a few political barbs into its genre cocktail: a bit of SARS here, a bit of Iraq there. Yet it's with a black sense of playfulness and absurdity that these satirical quips are delivered to the audience, suggesting that the film's chief concerns lie elsewhere.
The monster itself is not a force of pre-meditated evil, bent on destroying civilization. (In this sense it is more Katrina than 9/11) Like any other natural disaster, this clever, ugly, lethal, clumsy, and at times ridiculous monster does what it does simply because it is part of its nature. It eats humans because it is hungry, and because it enjoys it. So in some ways it's hard to see The Host as a contest between good and evil. From a moral viewpoint (but not an emotional one) the film resembles wildlife videos of lions taking down gazelles.
Yet in the course of the showdown with the beast, there's a very human sense of loneliness that seeps into the film. Part of it comes from the realization that, in a crisis, one's country may be of no help -- or indeed, may turn against you. A disaster that rips through the fabric of society may reveal that the laws, conventions and beliefs that keep us civilized lie only on the surface. Perhaps the other source of the film's sadness is reflected in a startling line delivered by Byun Hee-bong at the story's mid-point: "Have you ever smelled it? The stomach of a parent who's lost a child... Once it goes rotten, the smell can travel for miles..." The family unit at the center of The Host faces the prospect of losing a girl who is dearer to them than anything else, and this too pushes them up against the cruel, arbitrary forces that shape our lives.
For me, The Host will not displace Memories of Murder as my favorite Korean film of this decade. Every scene of the latter work is golden, and the more you watch it, the more it resonates as a haunting, brilliantly-shaped composition. The Host is more of a spectacle film, a sensual burst of inspiration that picks us up and carries us along on a harrowing ride (this must be seen in the theater if at all possible). It is perhaps unfair to expect Bong to come up aces two films in a row; but it is surprising is that he came so close to doing just that. "
Source: Thekoreanfilm.org
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