Strong and Moving!

just watch it!

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

"By Stephenie Meyer, author of The Twilight Saga". Three young beautiful adults on the front cover. Wonderful taglines like "choose to love". The warnings were there, and I did not adhere to them. Ohhh silly me. This is yet another example of an intriguing concept being executed in the most generically dull method ever. A love triangle? Really? Well, more like a love parallelogram. A parasitical alien race have invaded Earth and search for hosts to control. An organism named Wanderer is implanted into a young girl where she refuses to relinquish control. A simple case of a seemingly antagonistic entity learning the strength of humanity and betraying their own kind to better understand the emotional complexity of human beings. Alas, what we actually get is an alien romanticising with a man whilst simultaneously the same girl falls back in love with another guy. The girl and organism being in the same body, this creates a conflict of interest. Forget about the interesting derequisition of humanity. Put aside the slick chrome plated vehicles and the minimalistic design, both architecturally and decoratively. We have to settle for a boring, lifeless love story. 'Twilight: Loving Hosts'. Niccol takes the source material of Meyer's "ingenious imaginative" novel and manages to lengthen an unloving love story to over two hours. Stilted performances, with a few glimpses of excellence from Ronan and Kruger, a lifeless screenplay that removes any humanity that the human characters have. They are just as soulless as the hosts. The script insistently references life as a bigger picture, attempting to be philosophical, but actually its just words conveniently strung together creating weightless sentences. It's all set in a cave. The ending was stupendously cheesy. The only saving grace was Imagine Dragons' 'Radioactive'. So aside from some minor scenes of genuine entertainment, The Host climbs inside a thought provoking concept and struggles to do anything meaningful with it. I shan't be reading the book, that's a fact.

I absolutely fell in love with the book and then to have the movie resemble so many moments with the same amount of detail was great. Saoirse was perfect for Melanie and what made this movie so perfect was how truly pure the love between Ian and Wanda was because after all he ,Ian the human loved her, the soul called wanderer. It's a little sad that some of the most beautiful lines from the book didn't make it into the movie but I still loved it

There is always a certain amount of trepidation when sitting down to watch a adaptation of a book into film. Thankfully this is a faithful take on the book.The Host tells the story of a non corporeal alien race who have taken over Earth by inhabiting the bodies of almost all of humanity. Melanie Stryder, part of the resistance, and one of the only few remaining humans, is captured and turned into a host. Now with a dominant alien being inside her, Melanie remains trapped inside her human body and she fights to save her brother and be reunited with her true love, Jared.The Host is a strangely engaging for a film where nothing very much really happens.The narrative in itself is admittedly an interesting one; the utopian future, where humanity barely exists any longer except for the resistance, a small group of human humans who live in caves in the desert fending for themselves, hoping not to be taken over by the parasites. Seeing how the remains of the human race are living, surviving in their self built underground lair is life affirming, and the welcoming of a stranger into their home, especially one who could threaten their cover, is uplifting. The climax is heartwarming too, if a little predicable (even if you haven't read the book) where both the underdog, in this case humanity itself, and of love true love, win through.The sweeping desert landscapes and the utopian cityscapes are breathtaking and beautiful. Even the underground home of the resistance is simply but beautifully crafted. Even the aliens shopping facilities and transport are enviable.Our lead as Melanie/Wanderer, is the main issue with the film. There is an obvious difficulty developing the two leading characters in the time usually taken for just one. She is relatively emotionless and static for the most part and while this is clearly a trait of the alien beings, the conflict between the host and the human still fighting inside never really leaves this inert state of emotion. Sadly this makes the character of Melanie/Wanderer rather unsympathetic. The novel obviously develops the emotional turmoil much more successfully. The tumult of Wanderer when she falls in love with Ian ultimately fails when portrayed by Wanderer's blank expressions and Melanie's wan voiceover. One would think this is more a performance based issue rather than a storytelling one. Disappointingly, Saoirse Ronan is not engaging as neither Melanie nor Wanda.The voiceover occasionally grates too. It is a very unusual device to use throughout a film narrative, albeit one that does work, and is an effective way of getting Melanie's point of view across. It is also faithful to the way in which the novel is written.Diane Krueger, however, is great at The Seeker, playing the struggle between her human side and host subtly, but with more success. The moment she shoots one of her fellow seekers, is the turning point for her character(s), her obvious turmoil showing with no need for a voiceover, just simply great acting.The majority of the other characters are reduced to supporting roles, Melanies lover Jared, and her brother Jamie are lucky enough to be included in the flashback story of Melanie, pre insertion, but Jamie is sadly underdeveloped and Jared only a tad more so. Ian is the character that suffers the most, his pain in falling for Wanderer is sadly non existent, making him rather two dimensional. Uncle Jeb is more favourable, kindly, and sympathetic to the alien race, he is a champion to the human race.BOTTOM LINE: Faithful adaptation of the novel, with an appealing and uplifting message.With mixed performances, the production is really the star, but still worth getting into the skin of.

I saw this on television (no money) and i liked it. This was a good movie for that price (0), but if i payed money for it i would have been mad.This is a series style-movie. It starts off quite interestingly, but the acting throughout the movie is quite bad, as a movie, but interesting as a concept.But for a short free entertainment its actually quite nice. It is not the usual hack and slash-brain dead garbage that is normally Hollywood-produced nowadays, and just for that i raise the score a few points.Many of the scenes are complete illogical, so many of my 6 points is given for novelty and 0 for acting or logic. For instance there is a scene where a truck with stolen items are slightly surrounded by aliens - the enemy of the humans, on bikes and helicopters and small glittery Porsches.The surrounded humans then proceeded to take their own lives just like that. Erm OK? Really? So why not just run over a little alien on a bike? or just smash the truck into the helicopter? or why not just try to escape again? Or just be taken and get a host implanted and then resist? No just take your own life for being slightly surrounded by a 2 bikes 2 Porsche and a helicopter. Perhaps they didn't watch so many movies in their lives.