Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

by WAH-HUI ONG

What do you do with a film that New York Magazine calls “one of the greatest monster movies ever made” and The New Yorker describes as “a thing of beauty, the perfect mixture of the silly and the grave?” Simple — watch it, and discover its beauty yourself.

“The Host” is a delightfully entertaining mutant-monster flick set in Seoul, South Korea. The opening scene takes place in 2002 at a U.S. Military base, where a U.S. morgue worker orders a Korean subordinate to pour old bottles of formaldehyde down the sink; the toxic chemical ends up in the Han River that flows through Seoul.

Fast forward to 2006. On an idyllic sunny day by the banks of the Han River, a dim-witted Park Kang-Du (Song Kang-Ho) is working at his family’s food stand when his daughter, Hyun-Seo (Ko A-Sung) returns from school, upset with him for missing a parent-teacher meeting. As Kang-Du goes to make a delivery, he notices that a crowd has gathered to gawk at something hanging from the struts of the Han River Bridge.

As the crowd watches, the creature slowly uncurls and dives cleanly into the water. As it swims along the banks, more people start shouting, wondering what it could be.

The scene turns into mayhem when the creature, a genetically modified, bus-size, part-fish, part-reptile monster, crawls up the riverbank and starts attacking and eating people. Kang-Du and his daughter run for their lives, but Hyun-Seo falls behind and the creature takes him away.

Thinking his daughter is dead, Kang-Du receives a call from Hyun-Seo, who has managed to stay alive through pure wit but can’t get out of a sewer where the creature stashes away its victims for future meals. So begins the adventure by the Kang-Du and his family to rescue Hyun-Seo.

South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s third movie contains action, dysfunctional family comedy, and sociopolitical satire. The action is delivered superbly by the man-eating, rampaging amphibian monster, which is the product of the combined wizardry of Weta Workshop (King Kong, The Lord of the Rings) and The Orphanage (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Sin City). Like Jaws and Godzilla, the creature has a personality. In a scene where Hyun-Seo tries to escape by jumping off the back of the sleeping monster, it catches her in mid-air with its tail, places her down carefully, and for a few tense seconds, plays mind games with the girl.

Film Credits

Director: BONG JOON-HO

Screenplay: BONG JOON-HO, HAH JOON-WON, BAEK CHUL-HYUN

Cast:
Park Kang-Du - SONG KANG-HO
Park Hee-Bong - BYUN HEE-BONG
Park Nam-Il - PARK HAE-IL
Park Nam-Joo - BAE DOO-NA
Park Hyun-Seo - KO A-SUNG

Genre: Action, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

Rating: R (for creature violence and language)

Length: 119 minutes

Theatres: Opened March 9. Catch it at Landmark Theaters in the district.

The film is peppered with poignant scenes of human drama depicting the strong familial ties that bind Asian families together — even dysfunctional ones like the Park family. In his interview with Cinematical.com, director Bong says that he chose to use “somewhat loser” characters who are quite ordinary — so that audiences can sympathize with them.

The grandfather, Hee-Bong (Byun Hee-Bong), is the family’s pillar of strength, moral compass, protector, and in the absence of a mother, also the homemaker. His eldest son, Kang-Du, lives to eat, constantly messes things up and has a knack for falling asleep anywhere. The younger college-educated son, Nam-Il (Park Hae-Il), drinks too much and thinks the world is against him because he has no job. Daughter Nam-Joo (Bae Doo-Na) is a national archer for whom the gold medal remains elusive because she takes too long to fire her winning shot. But the family is brought together — literally kicking and screaming — by Hyun-Seo’s presumed death, and they work together in their search for her, battling the enraged monster, dodging the U.S. and Korean militaries, and maneuvering the country’s gargantuan and unfeeling bureaucracy.

For a satire, the film touches on sensitive issues that run deep among South Koreans. One of these is resentment toward continued presence of U.S. military bases in the country. The opening scene in the morgue is based on a true event in 2000 that led to a political stand-off between South Korea and the United States over the latter’s unwillingness to hand over custody of the U.S. morgue worker.

Other parodies keep the satire of the U.S. military going. For example, the film shows both the World Health Organization and the United States spreading propaganda that says the monster is the host of a virus similar to that which causes SARS. They use that as leverage to interfere with Seoul’s crisis in order to apprehend the Park family, who is thought to have been exposed to the virus, so that they can isolate and examine them. The virus itself is strongly symbolic of communist ideology. It follows then that the monster is emblematic of North Korea, and there are poignant scenes at the end of the movie that reinforce this allegory.

“The Host” is the most successful release in the history of Korean cinema. It has been nominated for two Saturn Awards for Best International Film and Best Performance by a Younger Actor, and a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Asia Film. Bong made his feature film debut “Barking Dogs Never Bite” in 2000. For his 2003 film “Memories of Murder,” he won South Korea’s Grand Bell Award for Best Film Director.