Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan), a teenage girl from small town Louisiana, is one of the few humans left on planet Earth. With everyone else getting caught and transformed by the alien race, she is left alone and on the run with her little brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury). To their knowledge, they could very well be the only ones still resisting the alien colonization.
I walked into the movie The Host excited and ready for an action packed, love filled, heart-wrenching story– one that I had no doubt a novelist like Stephenie Meyer could write. It started off very serious with some eerie music, putting me in the sci-fi mood quite quickly. I thought I liked where this was headed, but then things got really dramatic, really fast.
All of a sudden there were characters falling in love right after they met, so many tears I thought they’d pour out of the screen, and scenes that were supposed to seem light and happy, were just kind of forced and out of place. Although slightly disappointed and a little turned off by the cast now, I kept my spirits up with a two hour movie ahead of me, there’s always room for improvement.
The show continued, and I soon started to see the creativity behind the storyline. This movie was not about aliens taking over our world; instead, it was a foreshadowing idea as to what could happen if we did not learn to coexist as humans. With each character brought a different aspect of life on this planet and the difficulties we’ve had of meshing with each other. The subliminal messaging is faint but not unnoticeable.
A key character, “The Seeker” (human hunter), played by Diane Kruger, shows a battle not between the humans and the Hosts (aliens), but between the two that live inside her.
Seeker was implanted with a Host that was supposed to take over her entire mind and body; however, the human she was before was too strong of an individual to just let that happen. Together, they fought a war similar to the one Melanie faced after she got imbedded with her own parasite. The only difference is, Melanie learned to live in harmony with her host, Wanda, and brought their two heads together solving problems that couldn’t be accomplished separately… *tear.
On the other hand, The Seeker and her Host constantly fought over who had total control of the body, resulting them in harmful situations where they were disrupting peace and creating hardships for the individuals around them.
Towards the end of the movie, I was alone sharing soft sobs with the one other stranger in the theater. Together we watched two people face their backs on their own kind to do what was right, resulting in a revolution for the better. Although this movie seemed to be iffy at the start, the rest justified and brought purpose to the viewers. Thus, I would give it a four out of five star rating. The very talented cast grew on me more and more as the movie progressed; you know there’s good acting when you’re throwing your fingers at the screen, yelling at the bad guys. Even though I’ve seen it twice now, I would without a doubt pay ten more bucks to land me in front of that screen again.
