The Host

Since we were all badly in need of some escapism, N° 1 daughter was dispatched this evening to choose a DVD that would please ‘everybody’. She returned with a 2006 blockbuster, The Host, which, the blurb told her, was ‘second only to Alien in terms of popularity’. Well, it was both a ‘blockbuster’ and indeed  ‘second only to Alien in terms of popularity’ – in South Korea!  We sportingly watched the whole thing, moaning and groaning, and afterwards agreed that it had been a pretty bad film but, actually, it has grown on me. In the first place, it has that very particular Asian combination of the sad/serious and slapstick comedy (think Jackie Chan) which nowadays we find daft but not so long ago adored in the likes of Norman Wisdom and the Ealing comedies. In the second place, the monster’s gruesome mandibles indeed owe a lot to Alien but the rest of its newt-like body would not have looked out of place in a Hanoi water puppet show. In the third place, the film makes some thinly-veiled criticisms of South Korea’s American military guests and some pretty explicit references to real US horrors like the leakage of vast amounts of formaldehyde into the Han River or Agent Orange. And then you realise that the monster is a classic metaphor (aren’t they all?). Wherever foreign armies lumber, damage is done…