Unlike the “Twilight” novels, which were set in the present with a very particular kind of conservative ideology, “The Host” is in a dystopian future where hunger, poverty, war, and all other human vices have been eradicated. The world is a gleaming, white, sterile-looking place, but that’s because the aliens the Souls have taken over. With their ability to slip into a human body and co-opt it, the Souls drain humans of—yup, you guessed it!—their own souls, instead using them as replacement bodies in their own manifestation of the perfect society. So Earth is running smoothly, but that’s because no humans are getting what they want. The controlled ones don’t even remember what “want” is.
There are some groups of refugee survivors, though, and among them is Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan, of “Hanna” and “The Lovely Bones”), a teen girl struggling to protect herself; her family, including Uncle Jeb (William Hurt, of “Robin Hood”) and younger brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury); and her boyfriend Jared (Max Irons, of “Red Riding Hood”). But during a particularly reckless escape attempt, Melanie is possessed by the Wanderer, one of the Souls tasked with sweeping around the minds of captured humans and finding out information about other fugitives; this Wanderer also has a female consciousness, and although she is 1,000 years old, there are some shared emotions between her and Melanie. So although Melanie is, on the outside, already fully possessed by the Wanderer (you can tell by her brightly glowing, but eerily vacant, blue-white eyes), mentally, there’s more of a power struggle going on. Melanie hasn’t totally given up her body, and Wanderer isn’t ready to abandon it yet, either. For the time being, they’re forced to coexist.
Of course, that shared body snafu has a whole set of problems—especially since the Wanderer is supposed to report to Terra the Seeker (Diane Kruger, of “Unknown”), but she and Melanie are almost beginning to like each other. And when Terra threatens to separate them after the Wanderer seems hesitant to spill where the rest of Melanie’s family is hiding, Melanie/Wanderer go on the run, rejoining Uncle Jeb and Co. in a series of caves in the desert, where the surviving humans are trying to keep a low profile but start a new life. Jeb, sympathetic to the duality of Melanie/Wanderer, offers to take them in, and Wanderer even gets a nickname—Wanda. Silly humans! So affectionate in their treatment of this bizarre alien form.
Well, to be fair, not everyone is affectionate. Jared, once so in love with Melanie, now wants nothing to do with her, bitter that her body has been co-opted. And Wanda doesn’t feel that much for Jared, anyway; she’s instead developing a crush on Ian (Jake Abel, of “I Am Number Four,” “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” and “The Lovely Bones”). So four romantic players trying to navigate three bodies, all while Terra is chasing them and the world is in great danger. Yup, that kind of convoluted “romance” sounds about right for a Meyer plot.
Director Andrew Niccol, who also wrote the screenplay for “The Host,” brings his background in the sci-fi genre into play here; it’s clear that he’s done these kinds of visuals before. But his experience with the form can’t redeem the various absurdities of the plot structure, such as how Melanie/Wanderer communicate with each other (Melanie in voiceover, Wanda responding to her in spoken dialogue; the arguments Ronan must have with herself become exhausting to listen to), and just the utter bizarreness of how Melanie’s body is traded and bartered. She’s not being taken advantage of by the boys, necessarily, but the suggestions the film makes about companionship and physicality—and Meyer’s consistent proposal that romantic love is the end-all, be-all, purpose for a girl’s life—will make your skin crawl a bit.
Plus, while the arguments about passion and ethics and love and life may have played better in Meyer’s 625-page book, when spoken out loud between Melanie and Wanderer, they lose their implied gravitas. And, as we all know, Meyer is nothing if not overly serious—lest you forget, nothing actually happened in most of the “Twilight” series, and it lasted for thousands of pages and hundreds of minutes onscreen. So it goes with “The Host,” which despite Ronan’s and Kruger’s best efforts is just as manipulative and superficial as anything else Meyer has ever done.
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