Stephenie Meyer goes from vamps to aliens with The Host, her grand follow-up to the mega franchise Twilight. Author of the bestselling novel and producer of the film, Meyer has created a slightly soft-boiled sci-fi world in which teens fall in and out of love against an epic backdrop akin, sort of, to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 

Heroine Melanie Stryder (interesting name choice, Stephenie Meyer?), played with muted affection by Saoirse Ronan, finds herself cornered at the very beginning of the film by a band of weird-eyed, alien-infested humans, and soon becomes victim of the worldwide infestation herself. A glowy light creature (not unlike those from the 80s friendly alien film Cocoon) sneakily enters her body, and soon Saoirse is sporting the same halo-eyed look as everyone else. But our heroine is ‘special’, since she fights the invading alien presence inside of her with all her might. What we are left with is a protagonist with conflicting personalities inhabiting the same head, which may have worked very well in the pages of Meyer’s book; on screen, it’s far less successful, making awkward use of voice over and the actress speaking quietly to herself in dark corners. Only toward the end does it finally become less jarring.

 

The biggest and most original selling point of The Host is the idea that much like human beings, an alien race can be capable of both kindness as well as wickedness. Benevolent aliens are rarely given equal screen time as their diabolical counterparts, and for the most part this is handled well in the film, as The Wanderer, Melanie’s alien occupier, begins to understand how the invasion is effecting her and those she loves. Unfortunately, the inherent evil of a body-snatching alien
race gets lost in the shuffle, and with it any measure of suspense in the film’s second half. Diane Kruger drearily plays the stand-in for a villain, an alien ‘Seeker’ who is hellbent on finding Melanie/The Wanderer. Just when the threat she poses should be growing, her far less aggressive fellow aliens state flatly that she is alone in her quest; they would much prefer to let the human resistance die out on its own (a much less enthralling prospect for us viewers).

 

Instead, we are supposed to be wrapped up in Melanie/The Wanderer’s humdrum love triangle inside the confines of the human’s stronghold in the desert. Enter the boys, dutifully played by Max Irons and Jake Abel, each vying for the affections of the entities within Melanie’s head. While this Edward/Jacob tug-of-war may have held viewers’ attention in Twilight, The Host really should not at all be packaged as a love story. The film’s considerable sci-fi elements are not given their proper due.

 

—DH