The Host is a terrible movie. I went into it thinking that it wouldn’t be worse than the book, especially since it won’t have room for the constant filler and beatings. But it managed to find a way.
It starts off as standard futuristic looks for things, because FUTURE ALIENS, rather than going for broke on the idea the brainslugs keep acting just like us. We have get the stuff about how everything’s great and the environment’s already been fixed.
Then it’s time to realize just why the movie is worse than the book:
99% of the dialogue in the book is Melanie talking to Melanie2 while Melanie keeps a perfectly flat expression. This last part is so consistent that I’m pretty sure that’s what Meyer was going for. “Your face twitched, redo the scene!” I have no idea if the actor was talented or not, but she does manage wide-eyed innocence and that’s about the only time she’s clearly supposed to emote.
Everyone looks the same, and they’re too boring to expend effort keeping track of them, which really makes the which boy do I kiss?????? drama work even worse.
I started trying to make this into a proper somewhat organized review and I can’t. I was the only one who could even follow the movie’s “plot” and it’s because I just was doing a scene by scene comparison, and if you haven’t watched it you shouldn’t, so let’s just do some lists of the relevant information.
Changes:
Opening was multicultural when emphasizing how the brainslugs took over everywhere.
Future wifebeater skipped the conversation about how she’s so young. Also the bit about contraceptive, which is reasonable, but then flash back to the seeker who says that the sex urges must be fought rather than the book’s “oh, we have lots of places to hook up if you want sex”. So the movie is worse on sex than the book.
In this version, instead of a convoluted bit about finding her cousin, she’s just there with her brother while traveling and the brainslugs come by, so she sacrifices herself to save him.
The seeker doesn’t want to deal with the whole waffling bullshit and just says that okay tomorrow we’re swapping you out and then we’ll kill Melanie when we’re done, at which point apparently Meyer really wanted to keep the idea the healer was bestest most wonderfulest because the brainslug immeidately declares that the healer will help them!!! Then this comes to nothing. Also, Melanie forces the issue of desert travel by just crashing the car, but now supposedly she walked all the way on a single mini bottle of water.
They only seem to grow wheat despite that being the worst crop idea ever. And they harvest the wheat by cutting each strand individually, then dropping it and grabbing another.
In this they can alter the mirrors so it isn’t obvious from above, which actually makes sense, and she runs to help, which is actually convincing.
When the main group gets found out by brainslugs, they attack a guy, then seeker lady shows up and fires right as they flee and the guy’s getting up, killing the brainslug instead. WTF? I mean okay they’re trying to show she’s willing to do anything to get the humans but headshotting this guy didn’t help. And the other seekers seem just upset she’s upset enough to be firing randomly, not that she accidentally? murdered a fellow brainslug.
This time Melanie2 just cuts herself instead of explaining that having been punched in the face many times, she needs to be punched in the face more to cover the scars with a fresh wound.
Same:
Brainslugs still perfectest babies.
We still have good uncle/evil aunt, with “good” meaning very quick to threaten to shoot actual humans when they threaten the brainslug. And Jared does manage to punch her, but not constantly.
Melanie still decides being mute is a good idea. I really have to wonder what everyone involved was thinking. Didn’t the actor point out that this doesn’t give her much to work with? Didn’t anyone else notice they were spending half the movie talking around the main character?
Good uncle still reminds everyone this is a dictatorship, literally, but it’s a “benign dictatorship” so being ruled with the threat of getting shot is okay then. And he still names her Wanda because women get named by men.
When she finally does talk it’s to say incredibly unconvincing stuff that’s exactly like what a brainslug trying to string them along. Seriously, did no one even look at the script? Didn’t any of the actors realize what they were saying?
So much not talking. Now she’s saying the least convincing thing ever to the brother that sounds so manipulative.
Melanie still yells at Melanie2 to stop liking her boyfriend. Or maybe it’s other love interest? Can’t tell them apart unless one’s punching her.
Earth is still the bestest.
Guy still tries to murder her, Melanie2 still follows up by demonstrating that actually she can lie and their whole case based around the fact she can’t lie so she must be telling the truth about Melanie still being in there should’ve fallen apart.
Still has the whole issue where the love triangle involves Melanie being forced to kiss someone she doesn’t want to touch and is screaming to stop and the other two people being pretty okay with it. And she still angsts that he wouldn’t love the real her despite it being even sparklier than the sparkleyeerks described in the book. Seriously, they look like they’re what’d happen if elves invented robots.
Melanie2 still flabbergausted that the humans murder brainslugs, despite the movie being even clearer that this is how the humans handle it always.
Still the stupid fake drama of oh no what if Melanie2’s alien supermeds don’t work right, the nearly dead kid might die whole seconds faster!
Can’t remember and like hell I’m checking:
We see the guys on a supply run where the dumbfucks are stealing jugs of water despite clearly seeing they still have underground springs in this FUCK YOU YOU DESERVE TO GO EXTINCT.
Awesome seeker lady has found part of the group because they were speeding and they commit suicide to escape.
THEY HAS CHIKKENS
“If I can’t kiss her I can kiss you.” So he does. Melanie screams and finally gets control for a punch. “You’re in there! You hit me for kissing you! I love you!” Literally what he says.
Dictator guy actually says he’s hoping for a chance to shoot someone because he misses it. I guess every day he goes without shooting a human kills him a little inside.
Anyway, the conclusion of the clusterfuck:
“We cannot live with them like we can on the other worlds,” says the seeker, as if on other worlds they do live in harmony? Shame we’ve heard of all of zero other worlds in the movie. It’s almost like they realized the plot hole and were trying to fix it, but got distracted by how sparkly the brainslugs are and forgot.
Then the end is that a bunch of “seekers” somehow know to stop them while they drive and go through this long drawn out check to verify human, human, human, GOOSE brainslug who’s all NO I AM THEIR FRIEND WE DIE TOGETHER but it’s okay he’s another gone-native brainslug and the rest of the fake seekers are his human friends, because obviously when dealing with people trained to suicide rather than risk capture, you want to really screw with their heads first. Why the hell anyone thought this was an improvement over just running across another human group out foraging is beyond me, let alone why they didn’t change literally anything else in the movie instead.
They only seem to grow wheat despite that being the worst crop idea ever.
*sigh* Researching the correct crops to grow for a self-sustaining community in the Sonoran desert is easy, too, since it’s covered at the major Hohokam archeological site in Phoenix. Correct answer: corn, squash, and beans (tepparies are the original sort, but pintos should be fine).
Those all grow together and provide a complete protein. Then you add prickly pear, dates, tomato, peppers, thyme for seasoning (very drought-resistant, to the point that I’ve considered planting my yard in it), citrus if you have a water source, and watermelon (which you’ll want for the chickens, since chickens hate the heat here). Hunting jackrabbits might be simpler than raising chickens.
(YES, I am obsessed with proper regional foodways in dystopian environments. YES.)
[(YES, I am obsessed with proper regional foodways in dystopian environments. YES.)]
Really, everyone who writes a dystopia should be.
Re: regional dystopian crops, do you have any good resources for this? It adds such great versimilitude rather than going “WHEAT AND COWS, a der der der” every time.
A good shortcut is to look at whatever the native population was eating, followed by what crops they adopted when contact was made (some people were in areas with shitty options among the native stuff, and their crops and animals couldn’t really support civilization well). Sometimes what crops are currently grown in that area can help, but globalization means they might all be growing cash crops, and anywhere there’s really cheap labor, they might grow otherwise poor crops that happen to be labor intensive because it’s cheaper than paying people in better areas to do it.
Yeah, Farla’s nailed where I’d look first — native people’s foodways.
Also, schedules and advice to hobby gardeners working in that climate, though obviously “grain of salt” if you’re not in a future setting where current hybrids might have survived. If I ever finish my damned mystery novel, damnit, I swear I’m writing a YA set in post-Bad Things Happened Minneapolis, and it really matters that in spring, if you don’t have greenhouses, you’re mostly living on stored root vegetables, apples, cheese, and sausage, plus whatever you’ve managed to do with grain or corn. Turnips are going to end up figuring heavily in my protagonist’s diet.
Food Timeline is also a useful site for how people cooked in olden days and what ingredients they had.
Starting with general “how this place was settled” history is useful just in getting context. For instance, here in Phoenix, agriculture depends on canals. The original native peoples (Hohokam) with their squash-corn-bean diet built canals and there’s reason to believe their religion revolved around water rights.
As far as learning useful things about how cultures fit together, I’ve probably gotten the most value out of regional history/culture museums, since that’s a fast overview of everything at once, and then it’s possible to go Google the most interesting bits for more detail. (Now if I just used this information, I’d be getting somewhere…)
Come to think of it, they’re not exactly in a standard Arizona environment because they’re got functionally limitless water, although they might still have problems with the water depositing minerals. So they just have to consider temperature, soil quality and limited light. They probably wouldn’t want prickly pear indoors for that reason, but I bet it would look fine if they directed some water outside the caves to a ring of “wild” pricky pear, since rocks will channel runoff and so that’s place they’d naturally be growing better. They should definitely try harder with trees, those are much better for continuous cultivation. If it’s warm enough for bananas, that might be worth a go just for them being such a good food.
Chicken might also be a bad idea because keeping birds indoors = Alzheimer’s risk and the airflow in the caves can’t be that great, although eggs are so great. But hunting seems too risky. They could probably catch some rabbits and start trying to breed them in one of the caves, or maybe steal some pet ones and see what they could do with those.
I just watched this movie and it made me extremely uncomfortable.
I was not interested in this movie until I started renting 8 movies at a time from the past 2-3 years at the video store and I kept seeing this exciting stylized trailer for it, so I rented it with my most recent group of 8. I had a drink (a YA movie requisite) and I was only armed with the knowledge that there was NO WAY it could be worse than Mortal Instruments City of Bones.
I’m not sure there are too many fictional characters I hate more than “Wanda”. This piece of shit is way way WAY too on the side of genocidal aliens from Hell. Sitting there watching Wanda make out with Ian with both ignoring that they were doing it with Melanie’s body, with the endorsement from the work that this was a good and just thing, was about as morally horrific as the central idea of Enchanted that some humans don’t deserve to live and are better off sacrificing their existence so that fictional beings can inhabit their place in the real world that they have proven themselves unworthy of.
And now I’m seeing the ending oh la ti da on the aliens mercy they decided to re neg. No, fuck that shit. Just… reprehensible. WHO DECIDES THE BODY SNATCHERS ARE THE GOOD GUYS?
If I ever meet ET I won’t be giving him Reese’s pieces I’ll be grilling up ET pieces. Fuck you aliens.
If I ever meet ET I won’t be giving him Reese’s pieces I’ll be grilling up ET pieces. Fuck you aliens.
Hey now, aliens don’t have to be evil, and something that a lot of these movies don’t seem to acknowledge is that adopting a “shoot on sight” approach just exacerbates things. Media likes to use them as an enemy because that’s more dramatic and enforces a culture of fear and xenophobia – “We can’t let the
immigrantsaliens in or they’ll EAT OUR BRAINS AND PUPPET OUR BODIES OH MY GOD KILL THEM ALL!” But that’s not the only story you can tell with aliens. Personally I prefer the stories that take a more nuanced approach, even if they botch it. At least they tried, y’know?As for me, I’ll bring the shotgun. Eat leaden death, [s]demons[/s] aliens! :-P
Seriously, though, I hated this movie’s notion of “morality”: “Oh, you humans are so evil and mean because you’re trying to rescue the people who have been killed and possessed, in that order, and in the process are killing the invaders! How dare you do that to a species so morally superior to your own it completely annihilates every other culture with which it comes into contact!”
I almost read the book just to see if that was created by the filmmakers or by Meyer herself, but then I remembered how bad “Twilight” had already been.
Oh, you didn’t see the book? Farla did a readthrough of it a while back, maybe take a look at that.
Oh, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the suggestion! :-)
I suppose you’re right. Shoot on sight is not a good first contact initiative.
However after they murder and possess say one municipality, let alone 8 planets working on number 9, FUCK YOU ALIENS NONE OF YOU ARE GOOD GUYS.
And how fucking ooky is it that these remaining humans are colluding with the colonization and extermination of the next planet, in that their agreement with Suzie Pol Pot is to send the fuckers right on to the galaxy.