Open Road Films
125 min., dir. by Andrew Niccol, with Saoirse Ronan, Max Irons, and William Hurt

When it comes to The Twilight Saga, it is safe to say I have no love for its existence. However, for as stubbornly critical as I am, everything gets its fair chance in the sun. I knew nothing about The Host before seeing it; for all I knew, Stephenie Meyer‘s first non-Twilight novel was a mature, brilliantly crafted masterpiece. That being said, if I had the chance to place a hefty bet beforehand that The Host would be a flimsy attempt at a deep story, stolen from properly inventive sources, I would be a millionaire right now. Written for the screen and directed by Andrew Niccol, The Host is flaccid, offensive, faulty, and lost.

At the onset of the film, we find that the Earth of the future is in a state of complete peace. Unfortunately, the nonviolent, copacetic world is not the result of a revolutionary treaty, but rather the result of an alien invasion. A foreign race known as Souls (tennis ball-sized creatures that look like glow-in-the-dark caterpillars), have inhabited the bodies of almost every citizen of Earth. The few unaffected humans left live in hiding, working toward taking back the planet. Melanie Stryder is doing her best to keep her brother and boyfriend alive, but when she is surrounded by a group of Souls she has only one way to ensure that they are never found: she needs to kill herself. Melanie attempts to leap to her death, but upon landing somehow still clings to life, allowing the Souls to take over her body.

Now host to a Soul named Wanderer, Melanie’s mind and voice live on, sharing a single body with a filthy alien Soul. It is not long before Wanderer becomes affected by Melanie’s memories and the two body-sharing entities head off “together” to find Melanie’s family, who are hidden deep in the desert. They are not alone though, as a Soul hellbent on crushing the final existence of humanity is hot on their trail, fueled by the thought that Melanie’s family is the heart of the human resistance.

The cornball nature of the story begins to seep out as soon as the lights go down and profusely oozes out until the theater is drowned in a thick salve of sappy buffoonery. It took no longer than a single minute of William Hurt’s voice, mapping out the world of The Host before I began to sigh out of frustrated disbelief. When I wasn’t wincing at the pain caused by the melodramatic love triangle plot point (Stephenie Meyer’s obviously has a three-way fetish), my brain was hemorrhaging from the comical fighting voice of Melanie as she berated her unwanted body-mate. Never before has a disembodied voice been so tragically pathetic and moronic as in The Host. The sarcastic quips transmitted by Melanie sound more like the sassy comebacks of Blaine and Antoine from “In Living Color’s” “Men on Film” skits than that of an actual person who is angry and distraught over her tragic predicament.

It is hard to pinpoint who is to blame for the story’s multitude of questionable plot holes. Obviously, it is easy to call out Meyer and rip into her because everything starts with her novel, but the more I think about it, I have to believe Andrew Niccol did not have the guts nor the foresight to correct major mistakes when adapting the piece — that, or his ability to produce a sensible film no longer exists. In his last feature, In Time, Niccol created a futuristic world in which cars had live TV pumped into their consoles and scientists could embed life clocks into people’s arms, keeping them eternally young, while living forever, as long they could acquire “more time.” Yet, in this same world where Oedipal complexes must have run rampant, no one invented a fucking cellphone so Justin Timberlake’s mother could call him to say, “Shit, my time is running out, meet me here to give me some time so I don’t die.”

The same lapse of common sense exists throughout The Host. The only differentiating physicality between humans and Souls is that a body inhabited by a Soul has eyes that glow blueish-white. So to disguise themselves while going into public, humans wear sunglasses to hide their eyes instead of, I don’t know, wearing the same fucking contact lenses that the actors do to make their eyes look that way. Just as well, if the Souls know humans wear sunglasses at all times of the day to hide their eyes, why not ban sunglasses? It sure would make their jobs a whole lot easier.

Taking advantage of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers lore to make a gushy love story between a girl and her invading parasite (while being sequestered by William Hurt and Frances Fisher in a cave full of Abercrombie & Fitch models) certainly explains the extent of depth in this painful 125-minute film. The story attempts to explore the actual morals and spiritual aspects of human life, but fails to attach to anything purposeful, and when it gets close, it just drowns it all in kisses and face slaps. The Host is nothing more than a continuation of trash where no resolution solves any real problems, all of which is raised to prominence by lovesick tweens and disenfranchised wives.

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Matthew Schuchman is the founder and film critic of Movie Reviews From Gene Shalit’s Moustache and a contributor to Den of Geek.