Film Review: The Host

The Host. Rated M (science fiction themes and violence). 125 minutes. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol. Based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer.

Verdict: Love conquers all when you have a soul.

In the popularity stakes at least, something is going terribly right for Stephenie Meyer. Her best-selling Twilight books, and the big screen adaptations that followed, have guaranteed Ms Meyer a generation of devoted fans and followers around the globe. The interesting question, though, will be whether those same fans will give this film version of Meyer’s best-selling novel the same amount of fiercely loyal devotion.

With the human race gradually being overtaken by surgically implanted alien ‘souls’, Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan) seeks refuge in an abandoned hotel with her young brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury). Desperate to escape The Seeker (Diane Kruger), who wants to implant a soul in her, Melanie throws herself out a window. When she regains consciousness, she discovers that even though she is now an alien called Wanderer, her body is shared with the girl she once was – and together they go in search of Melanie’s family who have formed an underground resistance to the alien invasion.

Meyer’s premise of aliens taking over the human race was far more vividly and effectively realised in Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1954), which has been adapted for the screen four times – most memorably as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and remade in 1978). The catalogue of sci-fi possibilities are endless, but Meyer manages to side-step them all – focusing instead on a love story made all-the-more complicated by the fact that there are two young women in the same body who each fall in love with a different guy. And that just gets as weird as you might expect.

Niccol’s (Gattaca, In Time) script only serves to highlight the lack of originality on display, while his heavy-handed direction results in a ponderous film that takes far too long to achieve far too little. No-one is helped, either, by Andy Nicholson’s production design, which with the exception of a picturesque underground wheat farm, is notable only for its ordinariness.

Ronan (brilliant in the unforgettable The Lovely Bones) has the unfortunate responsibility of carrying this bizarre film entirely – and it is the strength of her performance (with fine support from William Hurt as Melanie’s Uncle Jeb) that makes this cinematically inert and ideologically suspect affair worth sitting through.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group.