David Anselmo: Actor
Review: The Host
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Host
Director: Joon-ho Bong
Release: 2007
Little Miss Sunshine meets Aliens in director Joon-ho Bongs The Host.
A fabulous journey into the heart of dysfunction, Bong explores the inter-human dynamic via rank, state, citizen and domestic relationships. What emerges is a violent, sad, touching and funny portrait of 21st-Century human city life. And a warning.
It is a fine summer day in Seoul, where candy shop keeper Park Hie-bong (Hie-bong Byeon) runs his trailer along the Han River with son Park Gang-Du (Kang-ho-Song).
On the television, Hie-bongs daughter Park Nam-Joo (Du-na Bae) competes for archery medals and Gang-Dus daughter Park Hyun-seo returns from school to watch.
What is happening beneath the waters of the Han will irrevocably sear their lives. Years prior, a Korean lab technician was forced to dump gallons of formaldehyde into a drain that outflowed to the Han. In the intervening time, something mutated in the rivers depths. While the Park family watches the archery competition, it surfaces.
From there on, The Host is a brutal monster movie - the fish-frog behemoth that springs forth and lumbers through Seoul kills mercilessly, and steals Hyun-seo from the riverside. The Parks have no chance to properly react, as the populace of Seoul is quarantined against the beasts return and against what scientists claim is a virus that the creature passes to those it contacts.
A single cell phone call convinces Gang-Du that his daughter is alive. The family escapes quarantine and pursues the monster into Seouls sewers, simultaneously evading the Korean authorities, who want them back.
Bongs film is funny in all the places it hurts most. During the initial attack, he paints quick impasto strokes of monster-on-innocent violence, but also winks at the absurdity of his premise and lets Song unleash some broad physical humor with an ungainly parking post and a bungled attempt to bash the creature. The ineffectiveness-as-silliness of The Host, when it happens, is also tied into a fairly angry post-9/11 portrait of the United States. This happens in sometimes multifaceted ways.
Canadian actor David Joseph Anselmo appears in the park sequence as a suddenly emergent American hero - bent on stopping the monster. He hurls a concrete tile like an Olympic discus at the thing, but eventually only succeeds in being partially dismembered.
Key to the story of The Host, however, Anselmos character, Donald, is then quarantined by the United States Army and is used as both the Seoul equivalent of the sacrificed 9/11 New York City fireman to provoke and invoke outrage and honor - but also a scare-device to keep the people of Seoul obedient in the face of possible plague.
That is largely the subtext of The Host: the dangers of obedience and the consequences of resisting authority.
Meanwhile, Bong and co-writers Chul-hyun Baek and Won-jun Ha tell a family story, not about authority and obedience, but about trust and the perception of individual values.
Gang-Du is perceived by father and brother Park Nam-il (Hae-il Park) as a failure, professionally and personally. Conversely, Nam-il is a drunk. Nam-Joo is a medalist, but she fails often because she cannot let go of her arrow timely enough.
Only Hyun-seo is the agreed upon perfection in Parks family. When she is snatched away, the family is no longer comfortably ensconced in their candy trailer with their broken-down relationships and their preadolescent distraction. The physical reaction to Hyun-seos abduction and possible death is lingered upon in a protracted scene of wailing and rolling around. The sting of real life is unrelenting for the Parks.
In her absence, however, the family must reestablish mutual respect and trust. This is initially signified by their escape from the hospital, the first outright display of team work, and in the literal getting on board of the foursome in a minivan.
The central portion of Bongs The Host is a hunt film, in which the Parks comb the sewers looking for Hyun-seo and the monster. As such, it is tense and full of jump-scares.
The monster itself is fascinating, a truly original, streamlined and well animated CGI that lives mostly in broad daylight. 
Interestingly, The Host is not about fear of the unknown. Its creature does not live in the darkness, in the shadows, but it bounds and flips through open spaces - a naked expression of military-industrial irresponsibility gone wrong. Jon Coxs creature workshop has designed a believable and fearsome thing, aquiline and identifiable, but obscene and biologically offensive.
Bong and his team wisely give the audience enough time with the beast and its lair to begin to understand its biology, its needs and intention - and to develop a relationship with it that is more natural than supernatural. Never sympathetic like Godzilla, this giant monster enters the National Geographic realm of mutations. It is huge and dangerous, but a product of its environment - no more anthropomorphized than a lion on the savannah or a hungry croc in the bayou.
The center in Seoul cannot hold. The external forces working on Korea in light of the monster -- specifically the influence of the increasing American military presence -- pull attention from the real monster and refocus it upon the invisible threat of virus. The Parks unity is not enough in the face of national subversion. No matter what their plan to rescue Hyun-seo, they are defeated by the draconian encroachment of martial law. By this process, the concept of family and unity is at once disintegrated on the micro-level (literally in that the family is broken apart), and reestablished on a macrocosmic scale (all disenfranchised post-attack characters begin to work toward a common goal).
If anything other than a monster movie, The Host becomes a call to the people.
By the time the United States military has moved its antivirus apparatus into Seoul, the streets are filled with protesters - no longer concerned with scaly creatures, they resist the coming yellow gas of America.
Bong lets his camera (luxuriously treated by cinematographer Hyung-ku Kim) linger on iconographic moments. Nam-il races across a Seoul square with a Molotov cocktail trailing flame. A homeless man hefting a can of gasoline over a railing. The momentary mise-en-scene of red and white balloon figures wiggling against the overcast river. Bong works with the imagery of resistance and writes a language of coming-together onto his screen.
The Host is nearly perfect, and its ending creates a kind of full circle that speaks of the spiritual content left to a world stripped of everything else. Gang-Du ends The Host saddened and nearly along, but hopeful and possessed of a new potential. Unlike the Gang-Du at the films beginning, however, he lives alert and simply - and makes a concrete decision to turn off his conduit to the party line, his television. It takes a giant carnivorous monstrosity to remind him of life outside the prescribed lines, but when the lesson is there, at the end of The Host, it is one worth absorbing and keeping close during military-industrial times.
James OBrien
Cinescare Staff
The Host, 2007
Only Hyun-seo is the agreed upon perfection in Parks family. When she is snatched away, the family is no longer comfortably ensconced in their candy trailer with their broken-down relationships and their preadolescent distraction. The physical reaction to Hyun-seos abduction and possible death is lingered upon in a protracted scene of wailing and rolling around. The sting of real life is unrelenting for the Parks.
