The Host Mini Review

The Movie that is. Love loved the book. Hate hated the movie.

Where oh where do I start? (Oh there's gonna be spoilers btw)



When I first heard that the book was going to be made into a movie I was trés excited, but then I had two niggling doubts.

First, how were they going to work with the inside monologues of Melanie? And as predicted this was one of the major reasons why I hated the film. It was so cringey, there were many moments where I had to stop myself laughing and cringing. Also the dialogue was terrible, but I will discuss this later.

Secondly, I wasn't too keen on the choice of casting. Yes I was massively impressed by Saorise Ronan in The Lovely Bones and don't doubt for a second that I don't rate her as an actress, as I have already stated she was amazing in The Lovely Bones; but I just felt another actor would have done the character justice. The physicality of Saorise as Mel was just all wrong. In the book Mel was a fierce 21 year old but, Saorise played the character weakly and has the looks of a 16 year old.

I also hated the cast choice for the seeker. Taking into consideration, she was short and had dark hair in the book, I just never connected with Dianne Kruger. I read the trivia section on IMDB and I think I would have preferred Eva Green as the Seeker to be honest.

I don't know what I expected with this film. It took a while for me to go out and watch it and after it came out I heard really bad reviews, but because of my love for the book I willed these to be over-exaggerations, but alas they weren't.

I guess you're almost always going to hate the movie version of a book you  love mainly due to time constraints; they are just not going to have the time to put everything you loved into it. Secondly there's that term 'based on', you know they are just not going to stay true to what happened in the book so this gives them free reign to add things and change up the whole plot.

My main grievances were that,

1. They never established the world. We never got to see how the aliens had changed the world and how they existed, we just got a small pitiful glimpse in a weak montage. This really made the story a bit lacklustre and therefore made me care less.
2. They never established the relationship between Melanie and Wanda. We could have seen so much more in terms of how they built this up. I just found it to be non-existent and very strange.
3. They focused way too much on the relationship between Mel and Jared - turning it into a thing of my nightmares a Twilight with aliens.
4. They didn't focus enough on the development of a relationship between Wanda and Ian, it just felt weird that all of a sudden Ian was in love with her.

1. We never saw the closeness between Mel and Jamie
2. They never talked about the other worlds that Wanda had inhabited, 
3. There was no sense of timing. As I had read the book I sort of had a clue, but to virgin eyes, it just didn't make sense we were never guided in terms of how long the action had taken place and therefore things just seemed really rushed.

There's so many other things I want to point out that was oh so wrong with this film, but we'd here all day.

To end I just want to say people should go out and read the book before they slate The Host as a bad story, even though it kills me to say this as an anti-Twilight fan, the book is amazing and it is much much much much better than this flop of a movie.