Korean cinema has been wowing us (well, some of us) for the past few years now. The advent of democracy and generous state handouts to aspiring young film makers have been major benefits for film fans across the globe.
Whether it's the live-squid eating existentialist ultraviolence of Park Chan-wook or the wordless humanism of Kim Ki-duk South Korean cinema is presently the most dynamic and exciting in the world.
And now, lumbering onto the screen like its titular star, comes Joon Ho-bong's The Host (Gwoemul), the most domestically successful film in South Korea's history.
Getting straight to the point, The Host is an unashamed monster movie. A giant monster movie. From Asia. So, if you're thinking 'Godzilla' one could hardly blame you. In fact, Tokyo's favourite radioactive reptile is very much a precursor to The Host's mutated river beastie. Most of us, of a certain age, probably assume we saw the original Godzilla movie, Gojira(1954) on TV as kids. Chances are, however, unless you've sought out the recent, excellent, DVD collectors edition or grew up in Asia, you've not really seen it at all. The 1956 US re-edit loses much of the original political allegory due to missing scenes (replaced with Raymond Burr and assorted 'Yanks in White Coats') and inaccurate dubbing. Although this was partly done to tighten the film up a little for a western audience there must also have been the intent to hide some of the Japanese anger present in the film, aimed squarely at US atomic testing in the Pacific, not to mention the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade before.
Like Gojira, The Host springboards from actual events, in this case the US dumping of formaldehyde into Korea's Han river several years ago. The enviromental effects were considerable and were still fresh in the public consiousness when the film was released last summer.
Of course, in the film the formaldehyde mutates some river-life (a fish? Salamander??) into a large, pissed-off monster with a taste for human flesh. Joon wastes no time in introducing his beast, not for him the slow revelation via scenes of people being mysteriously dragged under water or overturned fishing boats. Ten minutes in and we've already had a long, hard look at his star. This could been disasterous if The Host didn't have so much more going for it. The effects work, by San Francisco-based The Orpanage (who worked on The Phantom Menace) and Peter Jackson's Weta Digital, are excellent and lend a real personality to the monster. However, the real soul of the film belongs to four members of a deeply dysfunctional family who only begin to operate on anything like a normal level when their youngest member (a little girl) gets eaten by the creature in the opening minutes.
The father, played by Song Kang-ho (who seems to make a habit of losing his daughter in rivers, see also Sympathy for Mr Vengeance) is convinced the girl is still alive. Unfortunately the authorities, under the request of the US military have quarantined him, convinced the monster has infected him with a biohazardous virus. Escaping along with his father, his 'intellectual' younger brother and their bronze-medallist-winner-at-archery sister they head for the sewers of Seoul in an attempt to find the child before she either starves to death or ends up as dinner for the mutant fish-thing.
To say anything more about the plot would be to give the game away. Enough to comment that Joon's mixture of sci-fi staples, high comedy and human pathos works even when it shouldn't. Much has been made of The Host's supposed anti-American sentiment and there's certainly some digs at US imperialism and the myth of WOMD, yet the Korean authorities don't come off much better. The police are portrayed as inhuman and uncaring and the government as unquestioning stooges to American superior knowhow. This could well be a satirical dig at South Korea's 'buffer-zone' status in the continuing US/North Korean cold war. In fact, 'Dearest Leader' Kim Jong-il (a known cinephile) is reported to be a big fan of The Host, extremely unsusual given the anti-south sentiment in his country. Whether he prefers it to, say, Team America: World Police however, we may never know.
Despite all these poitical and social touchstones (which also include references to the SARS scare and governmental media manipulation) The Host never forgets to be, first and foremost, a big, fun, creature-feature. And it's a fantastic one at that. It's tense, it's scary, it's funny, moving and plays with your expectations from the opening minutes. It's also one of the absolute best films of the past year.