The Host

No, not that one, this one.

That's right, it's the new awful film adapted from the latest female disempowerment classic of the greatest setback to women's liberation since Ann Coulter, our own Stevenie Meyer.

The world of The Host is a peaceful paradise, with no suffering or want or discord of any kind. Everyone is perfectly nice and beautiful and healthy. According to the opening narration of Jeb Stryder (A Wooden Plank), "there is no hunger. There is no violence. The environment has healed. Our planet has never been more at peace." I knew it! Mormonism wins out and converts the planet. You heard it here first.

No, it turns out that nearly all of humanity has been wiped about by parasitic clouds of glowing sperm. These aliens take over host human bodies when surgically implanted into the back of the neck while the hosts, after a certain amount of time spent trying to win the psychic war for their own bodies, just "fade away", which sounds suspiciously like "die" to me. Think of a Trill symbiont, only instead of a slug that melds its memories and personality with yours, it's luminous ejaculate that kills you

Just when you thought "Bella Swan" was embarrassingly hamfisted in its symbolism, Meyer tops herself by naming this story's protagonist central character "Melanie Stryder" (Waify McBlankexpression). Get it, strider, because she goes on a journey? (Never mind that Meyer's characters never grow or change in any way.) We meet her fleeing in terror from the aliens as she leads them away from her younger brother (Typical Child Actor) so he can escape. In accordance with the most noble feminine virtue in the Meyerverse, Melanie sacrifices herself by leaping from the building to her death. She doesn't die because if she were killed by a seven-storey plummet to the concrete below, the movie would be over. Instead, she's captured and implanted with an alien that calls itself Wanderer. No, I don't know why the aliens exclusively use English and even give themselves English names like Wanderer. Oh wait, yes I do, because coming up with alien-sounding words is, like, hard, and if there's one consistency of bad writing, it's laziness.

Our Bella Melanie is able to resist Wanderer's mind mojo, so she spends the rest of the movie talking in voiceover while Wanderer talks back to her out loud. Why does Wanderer have to speak to Melanie aloud instead of communicating through thought, as Melanie does? Because having the same actress doing both roles in voiceover would be impossible to follow. Instead, Melanderer just comes across as a girl with severe schizophrenia, and the voiceover only gets more annoying as the film drags (and I do mean drags, Oh My Brothers and Only Friends) on, especially since 90% of Melanie's dialogue consists of her mentally shouting at Wanderer not to do something which Wanderer then proceeds to do. Yeah, the alien ignored you the first 300 times, but if you keep shouting at it to stop, no, don't, STOP!, it might actually listen the 301st time!

Wanderer has access to all Melanie's memories, so it reveals the name of Melanie's boyfriend (Trunk Slamchest) to the chief antagonist alien (Diane Kruger). I don't know what position this alien has, if it has any. It just hates and pursues Wanderlanie through most of the film. Later Kruger tells us that this information has been of great help in crushing the human resistance, though I have no idea why. All the aliens wear godawful blue contact lenses, making humans identifiable on sight, and there appear to be no humans who aren't part of the resistance (i.e., collaborators). Nor do the aliens appear to care to spare human collaborators if there were any. So why would the spermaliens need to know Trunk's name?

Wanderer starts to sympathize with Melanie and the humans because...um, and so it steals a car. (Well, it asks a passing motorist if it can just have the car. Being Mormon an alien, the motorist happily hands over the keys and wishes Wanderer on its way.) It drives toward where the human resistance is hiding, until it realizes Melanie is leading it the wrong way. It turns the car around, but before it can head back, Melanie uses her ability to control her body whenever it's convenient for the writers and intentionally crashes the car. Wanderlanie gets up and wanders (hey!) randomly in the desert until she/it/they are found by her/its/their uncle Jeb (the aforementioned Wooden Plank, making its first appearance onscreen) and a small group of humans. Everybody wants to kill Wanderer because of its ugly contact lenses, but Wooden Plank overrules them because if they killed it the movie would be over. He gives it some water and they take it back to the humans' little community hidden under desert rocks. So I guess Melanie was leading Wanderer to the humans, since she let it get more or less within walking distance of the resistance settlement before deciding to wreck the car.

And now the movie gets weird. In the humans' spacious and idyllic underground desert caverns, where they have a river of rushing water complete with bathing pools and a towering waterfall and an entire field of planted wheat, Wanderlanie reunites with Melanie's boyfriend Trunk Slamchest, but Wanderer finds itself falling in love with Another Guy (Smoke Manmuscle). Come on, it's a Meyer work. You knew there had to be a love triangle with absolutely no tension or drama because a brain-damaged centipede knows exactly who will end up with whom.* And do I even need to say that, like Jacob, the "loser" of the triangle gets a happy ending deus-ex-machinaed to her? (Well, it.) In fact, as soon as it became clear that Melanie wanted Trunk and Wandererererer wanted Smoke, I guessed that Kruger's "bad" alien would be removed and Wanderer transferred to its host body, because she was the only other hot girl in the movie and that would wrap everything up in a nice neat bow with no negative consequences whatever. That's how things work in the Meyerverse, where the good guys never really get hurt and no true sacrifice is ever made. The joke's on me, though, since that doesn't happen. No, what Meyer pulls out is even dumber.

But first we have to have some fake drama that we know will immediately be resolved with everybody happy and loving and with no bad things ever XOXO hearts unicorns. Melanie's brother Typical Child Actor is with the survivors, and he gets an infection. Everybody's worried because Doc (Token Black Guy)--come on, you've got to have an older, somewhat grizzled guy called "Doc" in these things--doesn't have the medicine to treat him. Of course Wanderer likes humans now because...erm, right, and she deliberately injures herself so that she can be treated by an alien healer and their magical "fix any disease or injury" device, which she steals as soon as the healer leaves the room. Wow that was...too close. There isn't even a scene where the alien equivalent of cops (yes, they have such, even though they've established that the vastly superior alien race has no crime or disease or bad things of any kind, apart from the deliberate and systematic genocide of entire sentient species for the sake of their own self-empowerment) appear and the audience worries if she'll be able to get the medicine past them. In fact, since the aliens don't use money (we see Wanderer go into an alien store and simply take what she wants and leave), can she even be said to be stealing the medical doohickey? Of course, Wanderer, despite not being a healer, knows both how to operate the thingamabob and how to implant an alien parasite into a human host, the only two things we ever see these "healers" do. So what the hell does it mean to be a healer when the other aliens are just as capable of doing their jobs as they are?

Later there's a highly silly scene that has Wanderer having a fit at discovering the humans have been removing the alien parasites from infected people, effectively killing both alien and whatever's left of the person. Err...what did it think we'd do? Wanderer implies the aliens have conquered at least 12 planets. Has there never been an attempt by conquered species to combat them? And it's okay for the aliens to kill us, but not for us to kill them?

I'm not saying Wanderer should be okay with people killing the aliens or that it shouldn't be angry or upset, but I am saying it shouldn't be so omg SHOCKED! and HORRIFIED!. Let's see, we invaded their planet and murdered literally billions of them, and then when I see two or three of our guys dead, I can't believe it's happening! And this from an alien that has supposedly lived for more than 1000 of "our" years. Why do all Meyer's characters come across as mentally stuck in middle school?

I'm not even going to get into how Meyer once again can't separate herself from her characters. They're all the same as each other, and so are the same as all the Twilight characters, because Meyer doesn't create actual characters, who have their own personalities that emerge in such a way that they move the story in ways she didn't expect it to go. She invents ciphers to march her story to its predetermined conclusion.* This naturally means the characters in this film know things they couldn't possibly know from what we've seen onscreen, but they know because Meyer knows, and having people just know things when they need to know them sure makes the whole writing thing a lot easier.

Let's just get to the end. Kruger gets captured by the humans and her alien parasite is removed by Wanderer in a way that doesn't cause harm. (Wanderer coaxes it out by directing loving thoughts at it. I so wish I were joking.) Kruger, like Melanie, turns out to be resistant to the mind mojo, too, but since this is the Meyerverse, she exhibits no psychological trauma from years of her will being subjugated by an alien presence that invaded her very mind and controlled her own body while she struggled futilely against it, to say nothing of being completely cut off from communication with anyone but her controller, if it ever bothered to communicate with her at all. But with Kruger the human saved, there's no hot young white women for Wanderer to inhabit so it can be with its man Smoke Manmuscle! Oh noez, mild disappointment!

As it turns out, Doc didn't kill all the people he de-parasitized. He's got one braindead human left. (So they can't treat an infected wound, but they can perform invasive surgery and keep a braindead person on full life support.) And that human just happens to be a young, attractive white woman! Just like Melanie! What are the odds? At least 3 to 2 against, gotta be.

So Melanie gets back with Trunk, and Wanderer can be with Smoke without any clutter, like her being in the body of, say, a man, or an old lady, or *gasp* a woman with a high melanin content. And so The Host just sort of limps off the screen, letting everything intriguing about its premise go utterly unexplored, its major characters all blissful and happy (a couple of humans died, sure, but they weren't major characters and are quickly forgotten), safe and consequence free.

Supposedly, Stevenie Meyer doesn't want to write any more Host novels because that world is "a dangerous place" and she doesn't want any of the characters to die. I don't know what's more absurd: that Meyer is so attached to her "characters" that she'd rather not write about them at all than see anything bad happen to them,** or that Meyer actually thinks anything bad would happen to any "characters" in one of her stories.

Forget it, Jacob. It's the Meyerverse.

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* Meyer claims that Another Guy (the one played by Smoke Manmuscle) had a small part in her original workup of the novel and that his "character" demanded additional attention, including involvement in the romance stuff. I find it hilarious that this "character" who supposedly had his own voice such that she had to alter the story led her to exactly replicate the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.

** I mean, not everybody has to be George R.R. Martin, but yeesh.

The Book of Eli

Okay, I know a Twilight post was due today, but I couldn't wait. I simply must tell you about the Hughes brothers' The Book of Eli, an embarrassing Frankenstein's Monster of a post-apocalyptic film, a genre I happen to love, thank you very much. Reading and watching a few reviews and checking out Rotten Tomatoes, it seems some people have got it into their heads that this movie is not bad. They are sadly mistaken. The Book of Eli is what you get if you take the Mad Max films and spaghetti westerns and put them in a blender, with a dash of The Postman for that extra flavour of Costnerian derivative tripe. Readers who come to this blog to take in Twilight-bashing by a semi-competent half-educated hack are free to skip to the real entry coming up next week. Those wishing to hate on a crappy Denzel Washington movie, read on.

The Book of Eli (alternate title: Neo: The Road Warrior) follows Denzel Washington as Eli, a fellow who treks through a post-apocalyptic wasteland carrying a book. He has been taking the book west, on foot, for thirty years, where it will find an appropriate place to work its magic. Eli is one of the few left who remember what the world was like before the unspecified nuclear holocaust that left most of the people who lived through it blind, and since he is both an unstoppable killing machine and a literate man, he is extremely valuable to the small-time overlord played by Gary Oldman, who only lusts after him more once he discovers that Eli is carrying the very book Oldman has been searching for since the nuclear fire rained down three decades ago.

Why you would hire actors of the caliber of Oldman and Washington and then give them nothing to do, I can't say, and I'm not sure the directors, the brothers Hughes, can, either. Then again, Oldman was in both Bram Stoker's Clearly Not Dracula and Hannibal, so he's no stranger to giving good performances in cinematic train wrecks. For Eli, he digs his performance in The Fifth Element out of the closet and dons it once more, and that's okay, because nothing else in the movie is original.

I've seen reviewers praise this film for its innovative re-setting of the Western in a post-apocalyptic world. These reviewers must have just lived through their own world-destroying "flash" that made them forget what happened thirty years ago, or they'd know The Road Warrior did this back in 1981. In fact, there's nothing in this movie that wasn't done better in The Road Warrior. I can't believe we're still ripping off The Road Warrior after a full three decades, and the Hughes brothers aren't even Italian! Is the post-apocalyptic genre so dead that even A-list filmmakers can only make the same movie over and over, minus all the colorful villains, moral ambiguity, and heart-pounding driving sequences? Can't we just get Beyond Thunderdome? Face it, Hughes Brothers. You can't do "living off the corpse of the old world" better than the Australians, the undisputed masters of modern society fallen into pseudo-medieval chaos. Aping George Miller just makes baby Jesus cry. (Yes, Neil Marshall's Doomsday, I'm looking at you.)

But the Hughes brothers don't just steal from The Road Warrior. I'll leave the Sergio Leone lifts alone, since it's hard to make a Western without ripping off Leone. (Unforgiven manages to pull this off, one of the reasons that film ranks among the greatest of Westerns.) It's too bad that, in stealing from Leone, they didn't also steal some of Ennio Morricone's music, since the music in The Book of Eli is atrocious. Never mind that, though, we've got some ripping-off of (sigh) The Matrix to do. It's not in the way the action sequences are shot. (Thank the Buddha, there's no bullet-time.) It's that instead of ripping off Leone's unstoppable gunslinger, who defeats his enemies through his superior fighting skill, the Hughes brothers ripped off Neo, who wins fights by bending time and space to his will.

Mad Max was not a superhero. He had a gun loaded with rounds that didn't work, and he was badly injured when he wrecked his car. He survived more through brains and driving skill than through brawn and endless rounds of ammunition, and his life was saved both by a guy who built a flying tricycle and by a kid who threw a boomerang more dangerous than Xena: Warrior Princess's chakram. Eli, on the other hand, is Neo. The guy is literally untouchable. Remember the final battle in the original Matrix, in which Neo nonchalantly beats the hell out of Agent Smith? Now imagine Neo was like that through the whole movie, and you have Eli. He whips out an ungainly, impractical serrated blade and effortlessly cuts multiple opponents to pieces, all without raising an eyebrow or the film's tension, since Eli is not only unbeatable but knows he's unbeatable, as if he read the script and knows he makes it to the end of the film. Nobody lays a glove on him, even the wasted Ray Stevenson, who towers over Denzel and outweighs him by a good forty pounds (and it ain't fat). Stevenson's character shoots Eli from behind and the bullet penetrates the leather collar of Denzel's jacket, directly behind his neck, but Eli is unscathed. (Where did the bullet go?) Moments later, Pullo draws a bead on Eli, who is standing perhaps twenty feet away doing absolutely nothing, yet Stevenson doesn't fire, instead allowing DenzEli to stroll casually out of boss Oldman's faux-Bartertown. Why? Because if he pulled the trigger, Eli would be dead and the movie would be over. Though later, Oldman does shoot Eli with a gigantic pistol from point-blank range and he doesn't die or even stop walking west, so I guess that shows what I know about the human body's ability to absorb damage from high-caliber firearms. How is Eli able to survive being gutshot with a hand cannon? Because "it's faith, it doesn't have to make sense."

No, seriously, that's a directly quote from the movie. Apparently, in some quarters, this movie is seen as some kind of statement of religious faith. Now, maybe I can't understand this movie because I'm a godless heathen who has some conception of the laws of physics, conventions of storytelling, and half an understanding of cinema, but The Book of Eli has six impossible things happen before breakfast with the only excuse being that faith doesn't have to make sense, and we're supposed to swallow this plot convenien--err, I mean, bold proclamation of religious faith. If I were religious, I'd be insulted. "Hey, Hughes brothers", hypothetical religious me would say, "just because I'm religious doesn't mean you can invoke faith to excuse lazy writing." But that's exactly what Eli does. Faith doesn't have to make sense, and neither does The Book of Eli. The entire narrative builds up to a moment in which Eli loses and is killed by the villain...only he doesn't die and instead goes on to win (told ya he's Neo), because God--or His representatives, the Hughes brothers--said so. If you're mad that this is a spoiler, trust me, it's not. If you watch the film--and God help you if you do--you won't believe for one second that Eli will die in this scene. It's painfully obvious that the filmmakers don't have the guts to be honest with their material and will somehow find a way for Eli to win, even if it amounts to them effectively walking in front of the camera and saying, "Nah, let's not end the film like this, eh?"

Most (all?) reviews of The Book of Eli tell you what book it is, and that's no spoiler, since a brain-damaged aardvark could figure it out within the first fifteen minutes of this soul-crushingly long movie (if the title doesn't give it away right out of the gate). Now, I'm no fan of Eli's book, the Bible, but despite the movie's strained attempt to explain why it's so rare, I never for a moment believed that possibly the world's most printed book would be so hard to come by. In fact, despite the film's claim that people blamed religion for the nuclear holocaust and so systematically destroyed all the Bibles after The Bomb (as if the film portrays a society that retains enough cohesion to systematically do, well, anything), you can't buy that there's only one copy left. What, mobs of blind people and illiterates went through every motel in the United States, located the Bible in every room in every motel, and burned them all? Every bookstore? Every library? Every home? (No, not every home would have a Bible, but how would you know which ones did unless you checked them all?)

And really, in the event of a nuclear apocalypse, the Bible would be even more treasured and valued than it is now. The Hughes brothers, for all their piety in creating this film, seem shockingly naive when it comes to how the Bible would be treated in a post-apocalyptic world, so naive that even the infidel--i.e., me--can point at their naivety and laugh. More, Eli refuses to let anyone even see the book and kills to protect it, which goes against the message of at least the New Testament as I understood it. (The film's ending 'twist'--not even all that twist-y--renders Eli's behavior in this completely nonsensical and makes God come off as a sadistic murderer.)

Must I even go through the myriad plotholes? How does the impossibly immaculate female lead (Mi Laku Nis) manage to escape from the room Eli locks her in? How does she subsequently manage to end up ahead of Eli, who continued west after locking her up, and without passing him on the road? How could it possibly have taken Eli thirty years to walk to the west coast of the United States? Can George Miller sue all these horrible knockoffs of his post-apocalyptic masterpieces? Why does Eli's God not want him to save a woman from a brutal gang-rape, when he has God-given(?) superpowers and immunity to harm that would allow him to defeat her attackers in a matter of seconds and continue on his way? (He's been walking for thirty years, so God doesn't seem in any big hurry.) Why hasn't Malcolm McDowell fired his agent, already? Why is the Ray Stevenson character's final scene so retarded? How can knowledge of what the pre-apocalyptic world was like have so thoroughly vanished in a mere thirty years? Why, after establishing that people born before The Bomb can read and have valuable skills, are there no scenes of how important these people are to the functioning of what's left of society?* Which George, Romero or Miller, has been ripped off more, and does the winner change if we only count Italy? Where does Eli keep the mountains of spare ammunition he goes through in various firefights?

The performances are generally okay, but no-one stands out. Oldman, as noted, is a less flamboyant version of his Fifth Element villain, so low-key that he never seems menacing despite his frequent brutality to women. Washington gamely tries to create a character, but he has nothing to work with. We learn absolutely nothing about Eli throughout the course of the movie. What did he do in the old world? How did he learn his incredible fighting skills? Did he have a family, and what happened to them? We never find out. He hears God talk to him, he walks west, he kills a lot of people. That's all there is to his character. Washington isn't very adept at the action stuff, and his acting talent and charisma are smothered by the character's lack of a third or even a second dimension, so again, why was he hired? Poor Ray Stevenson. The guy has shown he can act, but he keeps getting nothing parts like this one and the lead in that godawful Punisher sequel. Somebody get this man a good role! Mi Laku Nis plays herself, i.e., generic and unmemorable. Oh, and Jennifer Beals has a role as a woman who gets her hair pulled a lot.

What's left to say about The Book of Eli? Nothing, I suppose. I wonder about the next film that will be ripped off for three solid decades. Nothing in the '90s seems a likely candidate but The Matrix, which came out at the end and so still has another twenty years to go. Will the imitation Lord of the Ringses last like those of Aliens or The Terminator, whose rip-off machines are still going strong after almost thirty years?

Still, there is a tiny ray of hope to be gleaned from The Book of Mad Max: Maybe it will inspire a few people to discover the original Mad Max films. Hey, it happened to me when The Road Warrior showed up in theaters in 1995, under the title Waterworld.
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* I'm recalling a passage from The Stand in which a character explains why wars would be fought between settlements over who gets control of a doctor, say, or a mechanic, two professions whose skills are not easily learned without a skilled guide. But then, Stephen King was thinking about how a post-apocalyptic world would actually function, while the Hughes brothers are concerned only with how such a world would look on screen.