Three West

Whoa! This is an awesome movie! I can’t wait to tell the world about it. So, here I am telling you… world. The Host is fantastic!

What is The Host anyway? The Host begins its deliciously creative tale with a man being forced to dump toxic chemicals from a military morgue down a drain which leads to the Han river. In doing so, the chemicals in the river create a freakishly large, mutated river creature.

This river creature eventually jumps out of the water to snatch food, i.e. people, which it stores for later. During the creature’s first encounter, it snatches a young girl and dives back into the water while the father stood watching helplessly. Naturally, the family of this young girl thinks she is dead.

The government rounds up everyone who was present during this encounter with the creature and quarantines them, claiming contact with the creature causes a virus. The family of the girl is rounded up and is waiting in a hospital when the young girl, not dead but “stored” in a sewer by the creature for later consumption, calls her father from a cell phone she gets from dead person “stored” for later consumption. This is when things start to get more exciting. The family has to escape the government quarantine and go look for the girl. Once they escape, their own purpose is finding the little girl.

What makes this movie so great? Well… so many things. For starters I absolutely love movies that are well filmed. Don’t we all? What I mean in this case is how completely well composed each shot is. Each shot is perfection.

My eyes were completely glued to this film the first time I watched it and the 100th time I watched it. I love creative writing and I think this film was a bit of that. It had wonderful imagery, great characters and the filmmakers did a wonderful job building suspense.

My favorite shots are:

1. The mutant creature diving into the water when it was noticed hanging from the bridge.

2. The shot of the creature running towards the people on the first encounter at the river.

3. The shot of the creature diving back into the water with the young girl and another person in its mouth.

4. When the men in the family were shooting at the creature and each time one got off a shot, they fell.

5. The shot where the sister shoots the creature with the flaming arrow then turns and walks away.

This film is full of great shots! I can say, however, I don’t like bratty children in any film so I was a little annoyed at the slightly spoiled nature of the young girl. I don’t care what the reasons were for making her character that way, I didn’t like it. She did have some redeeming qualities however. She looked out for the little one stuck in the sewer with her. I was hoping his brother would live because it was nice seeing a young man care for his brother and make sure he was safe. He deserved to live.

The end was a little silly too but hey, I loved it anyway. The little boy would not have survived. I bet that little girl wished her family new CPR. I know I did. Silly stuff is forgiven when you tell a good story.

I did think this film had some absolutely fantastic characters. Being both a filmmaker and creative writer, I absolutely loved the multidimensional characters in this movie. The actors/actresses did really well. The filmmaker also consistently played with the traits of the characters throughout the film. We also saw each of the adult characters grow by the end of the film. The father of the girl finally asserted himself, the sister went from being a slow poke who missed opportunities because she was too slow, to being a person of action and speed when her niece needed her, the other brother who felt sorry for himself the whole movie finally got over himself and did what he needed to do to help his family.

I also absolutely love the entire “First Encounter” sequence. I don’t even think I blinked my eyes the first time I saw it. The creature looked excellent (until it was on fire at the end). This scene featured another of many great shots was when the creature ran into the trailer at the river filled with people who thought they could hide there to escape it. This scene had a lot of great energy. It is hard to explain exactly why I was so captivated by this scene. Perhaps I could image myself filming it or being one of the people running and screaming. That must have been fun!

My favorite aspect of this film is that I had no idea it was supposed to be comical until the scene where everyone was in the gym mourning those who’d been killed. When the main characters fell all over the floor in grief, I just about died it was so funny (you have to watch it to see what I mean). It was also funny when during all the mourning the man yelled at the woman for parking in the wrong spot.

There were just so many things. Like for instance, the creature would put its prey in its mouth, head first, to keep them alive while underwater. It was a rather subtle thing to add to the character of the creature. This film also had great “Moments of Silence”. For instance, when the creature snatched the young girl, the grandfather emerged from the trailer and it was dead silent. The father watched his daughter being taken away and it was dead silent. Excellent stuff!

I could spend forever talking about this movie but I gotta run! Hope you watch it and enjoy!

Other Great Scenes: