Bong Joon Ho’s first monster film defied creature-feature convention while delivering heart, horror, and humor that endures nearly 20 years later.
A widely understood trademark in contemporary monster films is that you don’t show off your creature in broad daylight. We’ve seen this phenomenon in Gareth Edwards’ lukewarm Godzilla and Guillermo del Toro’s kick-ass Pacific Rim (which, famously, never got a sequel). In adherence to this unwritten rule, the latter vexes by cloaking its mechs and kaiju in darkness, adding to their cool factor by having their distinct silhouettes loom imposingly. The former frustrates with a feature-length tease, too gun-shy to actually show the big monsters fighting in all their glory without obscuring the gargantuan details. Rarely, whether in good or bad monster films, do filmmakers make the bold choice to reveal their creatures outright in broad daylight. Then again, not every filmmaker is Bong Joon Ho.
What’s radical about the Academy Award-winning director’s 2006 monster movie, The Host, is that it wastes no time serving its dessert before dinner by answering every question one could have about its titular kaiju in the opening moments of the film. We get a breezy opening about some doctors, one of whom is a pre-Walking Dead Scott Wilson, and their wanton medical malpractice: dumping a bunch of formaldehyde into the Han River (something that actually happened in real life). What comes of it is a mutant tadpole that rampages on some unsuspecting beachgoers trying to have a lovely afternoon. It’s utter chaos. But amid the pandemonium, Bong doesn’t just have the creature mindlessly rampage about as every other kaiju does.
