Part of the attraction, of course, was the movie's high-level production values, with CGI special effects courtesy of an international roster of visual tech firms, notably New Zealand's Weta Workshop (you know, the Lord of the Rings effects people) and the San Francisco-based Orphanage studio. Either the Koreans got their movie creature at a discount rate, or the special-effects people are soaking Peter Jackson and the Hollywood crowd they usually work for. Ten million bucks usually doesn't buy this much glossy detail. The Host's mutant tadpole gets a lot of screen time, much of it in broad daylight, and manages to be damply convincing. Environmental pollution probably overtook radiation some time back as the causative agent for breeding not-so-tiny monsters. (Though The Host doesn't take any size prizes; its monster is only about as large as a delivery truck and has to put its back into it to knock over a portable snack kiosk. The creature's first onscreen appearance is so unimposing that the film crowd's reaction is to try to feed it beer nuts.) Where recent politics enter is in Bong Joon-ho hooking his script onto an actual incident, the dumping of formaldehyde into the Han River by a U.S. Army mortician. As The Host's American-doctor character rationalizes the act to his Korean assistant: "The Han River is very broad, Mr. Kim; let's try to be broad-minded about this." Relations between the U.S. military and South Korea have gotten a little chafed over the years, and The Host's recycling of the incident was what earned it the approval of North Korea's predictably anti-American flacks. Bong Joon-ho has maintained that The Host is not a diatribe against the U.S.—the South Korean government is depicted as being just as bad—and one of the few heroes in the movie is an off-duty U.S. serviceman, killed while trying to save people from the creature's initial rampage in one of Seoul's riverside parks. (The North Koreans must have missed that part.) As Bong Joon-ho put it in one interview, "It's a stretch to simplify The Host as an anti-American film, but there is certainly a metaphor and political commentary about the United States." Without giving away the plot—and the reason for the movie's English-language title—suffice it to say that there's something about the creature that is an oblique reference, confirmed by Bong Joon-ho, to the Bush administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
If politics were The Host only genre-bending element, it would be a peculiar enough monster movie. Some die-hard scary-movie aficionados outside of South Korea complained that it wasn't all that scary. The movie's thrills are more of the exciting rather than frightening variety, and the gore factor is limited to a few blood spatters on the pavement; Jackson's King Kong scores way higher on the ick meter. And as an action movie, it lacks the usual pedal-to-the-metal pacing; even the film's climax has a grimly measured andante feel to it. Which of course makes The Host a better movie, even as it goes off track as a monster movie. Kudos to film distributor Magnolia Pictures for not trimming the American release down from the film's original running time.
More than one reviewer outside the U.S. has commented that The Host is a family movie—if not a movie for families (some of the imagery is disturbing enough that you should leave the toddlers at home), then as a movie about families. The Host's action is carried by one of the most feckless assemblages of close relatives ever seen on the screen, as a narcoleptic loser dad, his alcoholic, overeducated and underemployed brother and a sister who either has acute Asperger's Syndrome or just can't get her ass in gear all set out to rescue the little girl who's been abducted by the monster for later-on snacking. In a Hollywood movie, they would all pull together, find out along the way how much they really love each other, etc., etc.—but The Host's dysfunctional siblings mainly flail and fall apart, sometimes in parallel motion, more often in circular tangents. If it weren't for text messaging, they'd hardly communicate with each other at all. But what they lack in cliché sympathy evocations they make up for in a sort of dazed, dogged determination, exhaustion turning the surliness dial down to mute forgiveness. This is an emotional realism not usually encountered in a movie about a giant amphibian running amok in an urban area.
The film's performances come mainly from a group of actors shared by Bong Joon-ho and some of the other hot new Korean directors. The gamine-ish Bae Du-na gives an effectively muted turn as the little girl's not-quite-there aunt, 180 degrees different from the live-wire punk/anarchist kidnapper she played in Park Chan-wook's 2005 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. (Song Kang-ho, the sleep-disordered father in The Host, is another Park Chan-wook regular.) Child actress Ko Ah-sung took home a Blue Dragon award, the South Korean film industry's equivalent of an Oscar, and it's not hard to see why: She's not only way cuter than Dakota Fanning, she can out-act Abigail Breslin. If The Host makes a dent in the awareness of American film-goers—and it should—it won't be just because of the polished special effects.