It's hard to write about Bong Joon-ho's The Host 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 hard to pinpoint.
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 is drunk and unemployed. It's a dysfunctional group, held together only by the crisis that faces them, and yet the family dynamics will feel familiar.
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, 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 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 nature of fate.
For many Korean critics, The Host did not quite live up to Bong's previous film, the now-classic Memories of Murder. Indeed, the more you watch the latter, the more it resonates as a haunting, brilliantly-shaped composition. The Host is more of a spectacle, a sensual burst of inspiration to pick us up and carry us along on a harrowing ride. 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.