Director: Andrew Niccol
Writer: Andrew Niccol
Release: March 29, 2013
Length: 2hr 5min
Rating: PG
What if everything you love was taken from you in the blink of an eye? "The Host" is the next epic love story from the creator of the "Twilight Saga," worldwide bestselling author, Stephenie Meyer. When an unseen enemy threatens mankind by taking over their bodies and erasing their memories, Melanie Stryder will risk everything to protect the people she cares most about - Jared, Ian, her brother Jamie and her Uncle Jeb, proving that love can conquer all in a dangerous new world.
I was fortunate enough to score advance screening tickets to see The Host movie early. I loved The Host when I read it years ago. I was able to read it again this year in audiobook form and loved it even more than I had the first time around. I found I liked The Host more than Twilight because I believe Stephenie Meyer had improved as a writer by the time The Host was written. It has an insanely creative and cool concept and I loved the characters and the heart of the story. So I was very much excited for the film adaptation.
The problem is, it's not necessarily a book that translates well to movie. There is a ton of inner dialogue between Melanie, the body, and Wanderer, the "soul" (read: alien), inside of her. In the movie, the filmmakers decided to have Melanie talk to Wanderer in voiceover and Wanderer respond out loud. It was incredibly awkward and cheesy, much like the voiceovers for the wolves in Twilight. There were a ton of unintentionally funny moments, also just like in Twilight. To be fair though, I can't think of a way that the filmmakers could have made this work on the big screen.
It wasn't a terrible movie though: I liked the cast that they chose and they did the best they could with the corny dialogue they were given. Fans of the book will be pleased to know that it is a fairly faithful film adaptation, which is no small feat considering The Host is over 600 pages long. Still though, the pacing was a bit off and we lose a lot of the wonderful character and relationship development that was in the book.
Bottom line: I think Stephenie Meyer is a great storyteller, but I don't think her books translate particularly well to film, unfortunately.
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