Fri, 29 Mar, 2024

The Host - Movie Review

By Shreya Sapkota

Photo Source: ThreesixfiveFilm
If I were to name one movie that I absolutely hated, it would be “The Host”, a sci-fi thriller adapted from the novel The Host by Stephanie Meyer. The reason why I do not like this movie is because the interpretation of the novel was lost on the way. Even though the movie was based on the novel and had the exact same story, a lot of the elements of the story was lost when the 600 pages of the book were crammed into a one-hundred-twenty-five-minute movie. People who have read the novel will most probably agree when I say that the movie absolutely trashed the novel. The storyline was both hasty and awkward. It was shortened and modified in such a way that a lot of scenes wouldn't make sense to people who hadn’t read the novel. Instead of showing the novel’s strengths and character development, the film was more of a list of the main events, never expanding anything to give it a proper meaning and backstory. It was harder to connect with the characters and understand the changes that the characters went through during the course of the movie. Even the bond between Melanie and Wanda is not properly depicted in the movie which makes up most of the main plot in the book. Whereas the chemistry between ‘Melanie and Jared’ and ‘Wanda and Ian’ were more or less non-existent. The movie misses out on many of the important aspects of the novel, from a character named Walter whose death has a big impact on Wanda to the interactions and the friendships she makes in the caves, and many other such significant scenes. The movie presented romance as one of the central conflicts rather than the relationship between Melanie and Wanda but couldn’t quite properly showcase the romance. These changes made in the movie were most probably done to appeal to a mainstream audience however it didn’t quite please most of them. Most of the time, films that have been adapted from a book always feel a lot bland in comparison, but I have never seen it gone this bland and boring. Overall the movie just scratched the surface of the different conflicts of the book and the most important and exciting events were left out. Without the action and story that it needed to be a good science fiction film, The Host, instead, was more of a mind-numbing movie with no particular genre to define it.