| The Host | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Hangul | 괴물 |
| Hanja | 怪物 |
| RR | Gwoemul |
| MR | Koemul |
| Directed by | Bong Joon-ho |
| Produced by | Choi Yong-Bae |
| Written by | Baek Chul-hyun Bong Joon-ho |
| Starring | Song Kang-ho Byeon Hee-bong Park Hae-il Bae Doona Ko Ah-seong |
| Music by | Lee Byung-woo |
| Cinematography | Kim Hyung-ku |
| Editing by | Kim Sun-min |
| Studio | Showbox/Mediaplex Chungeorahm Film Sego Entertainment |
| Distributed by | Showbox (SK) Magnolia Pictures (US) |
| Release date(s) | July 27, 2006 |
| Running time | 119 minutes |
| Country | South Korea |
| Language | Korean English |
| Budget | ₩11.8 billion ($11 million) |
| Gross revenue | $89,106,383 (worldwide) |
The Host (괴물, Gwoemul - "Monster") is a 2006 South Korean monster film, which also contains elements of comedy and drama films. The film was directed by Bong Joon-ho, who co-wrote the screenplay, along with Baek Chul-hyun.
Starring in the film as members of an unremarkable family thrust into the middle of extraordinary events were Song Kang-ho, Byeon Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doona and Ko Ah-seong. A combination of blockbuster plot and political commentary, the film also deals with the implications of America's military presence in Korea.
Following the success of the director's work, Memories of Murder, The Host was heavily anticipated. It was released on a record number of screens in its home country on July 27, 2006. By the end of its run on November 8, the film was seen 13 million times, making it the highest grossing South Korean film of all time. The film was released on a limited basis in the United States on March 9, 2007, and on DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD formats on July 24, 2007. It won several awards including Best Film at the Asian Film Awards and at the Blue Dragon Film Awards.
Contents |
The film opens with an American military pathologist commanding a reluctant Korean assistant to violate protocol by dumping over 200 bottles of formaldehyde down the drain, leading into the Han River. Over the next few years, there are sightings of a strange amphibious creature in the water ways. Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) is a seemingly slow-witted man who runs a snack-bar with his father, Hee-bong (Byeon Hee-bong). Also with him is his brother and sister; national medalist archer, Nam-joo (Bae Doona), and alcoholic former-activist Nam-il (Park Hae-il), as well as his daughter, Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-seong).
While Gang-du is delivering food to some customers, he sees a crowd along Han River. They witness a huge creature drop down from the Wonhyo Bridge. At first, it seems as though the creature has swum away, encouraging the public to bait it back with food. Moments later, the creature rises out of the river and runs amok. After causing much mayhem and death, it snatches up Hyun-seo, and retreats back into the river.
During a mass funeral for the victims of the beast (including Hyun-seo, believed dead by her family) Government representatives arrive and forcefully quarantine all those who have been in direct contact with the creature, including Gang-du and his family. The Korean government announces that the creature is not only a direct danger, but also the host of a deadly, unknown virus.
In a hospital, Gang-du receives a phone call from Hyun-seo, who is not dead, but trapped in a sewer. She is cut off as her cellphone battery runs out. Gang-du tries to explain this to others, but his protests go ignored by all except his family. The four escape to track down Hyun-seo.
The family searches the sewers to no avail, so they return home to the snack bar to eat as Hee-bong explains Gang-du is not a simpleton but has been crushed from the loss of his mother and his wife who left him with their daughter. They find the creature exploring and attack it with their guns, and when they run out of bullets, Hee-bong takes the last shotgun with a bullet from Gang-du, and attempts to fire on the creature, only to find the gun empty after all. The beast brutally kills Hee-bong in retaliation and arriving soldiers capture Gang-du. Nam-il and Nam-joo escape but are separated.
Nam-il now separated from the rest of his family, meets with a contact who is able to trace Hyun-seo's phone call back to the sewer location at Wonhyo Bridge. After repeated questions of Nam-joo's whereabouts, to which Nam-il honestly replies "I don't know where she is." the phone company contact disappears to a back room to reveal many men lying in wait to apprehend Nam-il for the reward money placed on his family's capture. After narrowly escaping using a clever distraction via a power surge he caused, Nam-il retreats under a bridge to send Nam-joo a text containing the location he just discovered before passing out due to the fall he sustained moments earlier.
In the hospital, Gang-du receives a call from his sister just as she arrives to the sewer and informs him of its location, moments before Nam-joo is knocked out during an encounter with the monster. Gang-du inadvertently overhears that there is no virus; the governments of America and Korea are perpetuating a charade. The American scientist who lets out the secret claims that Gang-du is infected in the brain. A team of doctors perform a frontal lobotomy on Gang-du. Afterwards, a nurse mocks the seemingly brain-damaged and unresponsive Gang-du. He suddenly takes her hostage with a syringe full of his "infected" blood, his "slow-wittedness" apparently cured. He escapes in an ambulance.
Nam-il encounters a homeless man under the bridge and unwittingly gains his assistance to rescue Hyun-seo. Still trapped within the beast's lair Hyun-seo befriends the only survivor of the creature's abductions, the street urchin Se-joo. She begins constructing a makeshift rope made from the clothes of the monster's victims in attempt to escape only to be thwarted by the beast itself who had seemingly appeared to be resting then goes on to swallow both Hyun-seo and Se-joo
Gang-du finds the lair just as the monster makes off with his daughter and meets up with the recovered Nam-joo and Nam-il, who has created molotov cocktails with the homeless man. The four meet at the riverbank, where the creature attacks a demonstration against the government's deployment of Agent Yellow toxin against the beast. The Agent Yellow is released and incapacitates the creature temporarily.
Pushing through the poisonous fumes, Gang-du pulls out Hyun-seo and discovers Se-joo cradled by his daughter, but she is already dead. Meanwhile, the creature wakes again and tries to return to the river. The party battles the monster, dousing it in fuel and then lighting it with a flaming arrow. Gang-du finally kills it by shoving a street post through its mouth along with the fire covering the monster. As Nam-joo and Nam-il mourn over their dead niece, Gang-du resuscitates Se-joo.
A short time later, Gang-du and Se-joo live as a family in the rebuilt snack bar. One night Gang-du believed he saw something move outside. He gets his rifle but then sets it down, believing it was his imagination. A televised US Senate press release - claiming that the Korean "disease crisis" was caused by "misinformation" - is drowned out by their conversation. The child asks him to turn it off, as he finds it boring, and they eat dinner.
The film was the third feature-length film directed by Bong Joon-ho. Following the positive reaction to the director's debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite, coupled with the critical acclaim and box-office success of his previous work, Memories of Murder, the film was given a generous production budget of around 10 billion won[1] (just over $10 million US), huge by local industry standards.[2]
Some of the filming took place in the real sewers near the Han River, rather than on a set. The stars and crew were inoculated against tetanus by the medical officer. During filming, the crew had to deal with the effects of changes in weather and ambient temperature. This including the sewage water freezing in cold temperatures, so that it had to be broken up and melted; and during hot and windy periods, the water evaporated and the silt turned to dust, which blew around in the breeze and into the faces of the crew.[3]
The director had to work around the budget-imposed restrictions, especially when it came to special effects. The creature was designed by Chin Wei-chen, the modeling was done by New Zealand-based Weta Workshop and the animatronics were by John Cox's creature Workshop.[4] The CGI for the film was done by The Orphanage, which also did some of the visual effects in The Day After Tomorrow.[5]
The monster was designed with some specific parameters in mind. According to the director himself the inspiration came from a local article about a deformed fish with an S-shaped spine caught in the Han River.[6] Therefore, the director's wishes were for it to look like an actual mutated fish-like creature, rather than have a more fantastical design. In the opening scenes of the film, two fishermen presumably encounter the creature whilst it is still small enough to fit in one of their cups; suggestive of its humble, more realistic origins. The monster also exhibits frontal limbs similar to amphibians' legs. This element of its design seems to have been more a choice of functionality on the designers' part as the monster needed to be able to run and perform certain acrobatic movements during the film.[4] For a genre film monster, the creature's size is rather small, only about the size of a truck. Also unlike in many other monster-themed films, the creature is fully visible from early on in the film, sometimes for large stretches of time and even in broad daylight, which earned the film some critical praise.[7]
The film was in part inspired by an incident in 2000 in which a Korean mortician working for the U.S. military in Seoul dumped a large amount of formaldehyde down the drain. In addition to its environmental concerns, this has added some antagonism against the United States.[8] The American military situated in South Korea is portrayed as uncaring about the effects their activities have on the locals. The chemical agent used by the American military to combat the monster in the end, named "Agent Yellow" in a thinly-veiled reference to Agent Orange was also used to satirical effect.[4] The director, Bong Joon-ho, commented on the issue: "It's a stretch to simplify The Host as an anti-American film, but there is certainly a metaphor and political commentary about the U.S."[9]
Because of its themes that can be seen as critical of the United States, the film was lauded by North Korean authorities,[10] a rarity for a South Korean blockbuster film.
The film features a satiric portrayal of the South Korean government which is portrayed as bureaucratic, inept, and essentially uncaring. Korean youth protesters are featured satirically in the film, with a mixed portrayal, partially heroic, and partially self-righteous and oblivious. According to Bong Joon-ho, the Park Nam-il character is a deliberate anachronism, a reference to South Korea's troubled political history, which involved violent protest. "When you look in terms of this character, it's sort of like the feeling of time going backwards. [...] You could say that he is the image of the college protester back ten years ago; it doesn't exist in the present day."[11]
The Host premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2006 and was released nationally in South Korea on July 27, 2006. Having been heavily hyped and featuring one of the most popular leading actors in the country, Song Kang-ho, the film was released on a record number of screens and made the South Korean record books with its box office performance during its opening weekend. The 2.63 million admissions and $17.2 million box office revenue easily beat the previous records set by Typhoon.[12][13] The film reached six million viewers on August 6, 2006.[14] In early September the film became South Korea's all time box office leader, selling more than 12.3 million tickets in just over a month in a country of 48.5 million. By the end of its run on November 8, the viewing figures came in at 13,019,740.[2]
The film was released theatrically in Australia on August 17, 2006. During the first half of September 2006, it premiered in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Hong Kong. It received a theatrical release in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2006. This was its first official release outside of film festivals, and outside Asia and Australia. Its American release was March 9, 2007. It was or is planned to be released in several other countries; among them are France, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, and Spain.
The Host received screenings on several film festivals. In addition to its opening in Cannes, among the most prominent were the Toronto, Tokyo and New York film festivals. The film swept Korea's Blue Dragon Awards : The Host received five awards, Ko Ah-seong took Best New Actress and Byeon Hee-bong was awarded as Best Supporting Actor.[15]
The French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma ranked the film as 3rd place in its list of best films of the year 2006.[16] The Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo selected it as one of the top 10 best foreign films of the year 2006. (Flags of Our Fathers won the best foreign film of the year 2006.)[17]
With a limited American release starting March 11, 2007, The Host garnered very positive reviews, with a 92% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[18] In addition, it was ranked one of the top films of 2007 on Metacritic with a score of 85.[19] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote "The Host is a loopy, feverishly imaginative genre hybrid about the demons that haunt us from without and within."[20] The filmmaker Quentin Tarantino included it in his list of top 20 films released since 1992 (the year he became a director).[21]
The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2007.[22]
The Host won 18 awards and received a further 10 nominations.
Won
Nominations
The Region 2 UK release of the film was released on March 5, 2007, while the Region 1 U.S. DVD was released on July 24, 2007 in both single disc and a two disc collector's edition in DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats.[23]
Twitch Film announced on November 3, 2009 that a videogame is planned,[24] it will be released as a multi-platform first-person shooter.[25]
On June 19, 2007, it was announced that a sequel was in progress for a 2009 release, with a different director.[26] The budget for The Host 2 has been set at close to $12 million, and will be based on a script by webcomic artist Kang Full.[27]
The Host 2 is planned to be released in summer 2012 and on October 25, 2010 was announced to be in 3D. Su-yeon Kim was quoted, "Given the nature of the film and the current trends in the global film market, we think that 3D is the medium to go." The film is said be a prequel to the first and will have multiple monsters.
In November 2008, it was announced that Universal Studios will be remaking The Host with Gore Verbinski producing, Mark Poirier writing the script, and first-time director Fredrik Bond directing the film. The film was set for a 2011 release.[28] As of November 2011, there have been no updates on the remake's production.
| Preceded by Sympathy for Lady Vengeance |
Blue Dragon Film Award for Best Film 2006 |
Succeeded by The Show Must Go On |
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