I’m of two minds about Andrew Niccol’s The Host, which is just as well, since so is the protagonist. She’s
a girl living in an unspecified future after alien body snatchers have invaded.
These aliens are parasitic souls who’ve attached themselves to human hosts,
making their presence known through the eerie blue glow they add to the eyes. The
earth belongs to them. Few humans survive. At the movie’s start, the girl is
captured by these beings and turned into one of them. Rather than conforming to
the pod people ways like everyone else, she fights back the best she can. All
she can do is scream from within her own thoughts, a captive in her own body, a
body that is controlled by someone else entirely. That’s a creepy concept. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers template
focuses on those left to grapple with neighbors who suddenly become something
they’re not. Here the unusual ones, the rarities, are the humans, our entry
point into the story a human who is resisting her own private alien invasion.
The movie that comes out of this is very serious about its silliness, by turns likable
and laughable.
The early scenes of the movie require a tricky bit of acting
from Saoirse Ronan, who plays Melanie, the girl forced to share her brain with
an interstellar stranger. The other possessed humans want to find the remaining
pristine human holdouts and colonize them as well. A lead Seeker (Diane Kruger)
urges Wanderer, the alien taking Melaine over, to access the girl’s thoughts
and memories and reveal the location of hidden humans. Melanie strains to not
reveal what she knows about her brother (Chandler Canterbury), her boyfriend
(Max Irons) and the humans they were travelling to meet. It’s a struggle
between two characters that has to play out in one actor. There’s a funny
little moment early on where Ronan begins writing but then, with a sudden,
quick flick of her wrist, throws the pencil across the room. Sudden jolts of
humanity cause the alien, still getting used to her new body, to respond to
fleeting thoughts of resistance bubbling up from her host. Niccol uses copious
voice over to put us in this warring mind so that Ronan ends up giving what
amounts to a vocal performance that demarcates two similarly willful
characters.
It’s a compellingly oddball scenario. Soon, the alien finds
sympathy for the poor girl she’s forced to share headspace with and helps the
two-in-one of them flee into the desert. There, led by Wanderer’s legs and
Melanie’s memories, they find a group of humans huddled in the caves, farming
what they can and stealing the rest from a warehouse that the alien beings have
for some reason branded simply “Store.” This particular group of human rebels, one
that now includes Melaine’s brother and her boyfriend, happen to be led by
Melaine’s uncle, a bearded, appropriately avuncular William Hurt. He’s a
gentle, resourceful survivalist who knows his way around post-apocalyptic
engineering and says things like “I always liked science fiction stories. Never
thought I’d be in one.” He holds out hope that his niece is still somewhere
behind the glowing blue eyes that cause the other humans to want her dead on
the spot, thinking that she’ll reveal their location. The rebels are used to
fleeing the possessed, and indeed we eventually see a few brief but impactful
car chases and shootouts as Seekers draw closer to their hideout while
searching for Wanderer.
As this is adapted from a novel by Stephenie Meyer, the
woman who brought us the sparkly paranormal love triangle of Twilight, the caves are also an
incubator for strange love geometry. Love triangle doesn’t quite cut it here.
The boyfriend is hesitant to embrace this new being that looks and sounds just
like his love while one of the other survivors (Jake Abel) finds himself drawn
to the new girl’s personality, which just happens to be in the old girl’s body.
Much talk of which girl has which feelings pervade the second half of the film.
There’s also much more interesting discussion about how trustworthy this
newcomer is and how much of the old girl still lives insider her. As Wanderer
gains more sympathy and understanding of the human’s plight, there are some
ethical quandaries about who really has control over this girl. The audience
has access to inner struggles between the two characters; the other people see
only the change. Do they treat her as the old girl they knew or the new girl
they’ve come to know? The romance of it all is admirably downplayed at times, but
there’s still too much hemming and hawing over who is being kissed and by whom.
Still, there’s something so determinedly weird about seeing a conventional make
out scene play out with a voice over objection from the other person trapped
inside. “No! Stop that!” the girl mentally yells at the alien in control of her.
I found it easy to scoff, but not so easy to dismiss.
Niccol has written and directed movies like the very good Gattaca, about a futurist struggle
against genetic determinism, and the very mediocre In Time, an on-the-nose income inequality allegory that swaps time
for money. With The Host, he’s clearly
interested in exploring the deeper questions, engaging with the material in a
way that draws a messy statement about personal autonomy and resisting
conformity and all manner of half-formed intriguing ideas. It fills the film
with lots of ponderous discussions that always sound like they’re building to
something much more profound than they really are. So much of the movie refuses
to make sense, either immediately – why are all humans with alien souls inside
them dressing in white? – or after the fact. Some scenes play out with a flat, unintentionally funny, affect and, as the plot drifts through its paces, I found myself understanding
character motivations less and less. It grows fuzzier as it nears its
conclusions. But there’s something I found difficult to ignore in the mood of
it all, in the stillness and slickness of Roberto Schaefer’s lovely, sleek
cinematography and the lush score by Antonio Pinto. There’s a dreamily still
strangeness to it all, an echo of 70’s B-movie sci-fi in its simple effects, limited sets, and
off-kilter normality. I found it compelling enough in its confident awkwardness
to somehow hold its schlock and seriousness in my head at the same time. I
can’t exactly say I totally liked it, but I sure didn’t dislike it.
