Kernel Rating (out of 5):
MPAA Rating: PG-13 Length: 125 minutes
Age Appropriate for: 13+. Much like the films based on Stephenie Meyer’s previous “Twilight” series, “The Host” has a good amount of violence (mostly hand-to-hand fighting and beating, and a character’s suicide) and some alien possession. Also some kissing, embracing, and cursing. Again, like “Twilight,” the danger in these films isn’t that they’re packed with violence or sex, but that they identify the only important thing in a girl’s life as romance.
Will Stephenie Meyer’s specific brand of regressive gender roles never disappear? Her ‘Twilight Saga’ may be over, but the film adaptation of her 2008 novel, ‘The Host’—about an alien female and a human girl sharing one body, but each loving a different boy—is just as reductive and frustrating as that silly vampire-werewolf-girl love triangle.
By Roxana Hadadi
Ah, the love triangle—Stephenie Meyer’s favorite thing. We got years of it with her four tedious “Twilight” novels about Bella, Edward, and Jacob (and, of course, the series’ five equally mediocre film adaptations), and here is that idiotic romantic structure, back again, in “The Host.” In a dystopian future where aliens have possessed our bodies and turned Earth into a smoothly running place, humans are on the run, searching for some kind of genuine passion. “The Host” is supposed to inspire us to choose love. You should just choose another movie.