The Host is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year — fiercely intelligent and satirical, genuinely poignant and entertaining. And one of the things I like most about it is its utter Koreanness; its social satire, ecological concerns, anti-American sentiments, and amazing special effects are all representative of various facets of Korean history, industry, and culture. For example, the opening scene in which an American military scientist pollutes Seoul’s Han River with bio-hazardous waste, which ultimately leads to the monster’s creation, is based on actual 1998 events involving — of course — the American army occupying South Korea. (Consider the mind-blowing arrogance of such an act. I mean, can you imagine the nuclear ass-whoopin’ another country would get if a scientist of that other country’s military dumped bio-hazardous waste into the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., without asking, let alone consulting, the American government?)
Thus it seems inevitable, then, that Hollywood, upon encountering this superlative, genre-bending (not to mention critically fellatioed) film, calls it a day distribution-wise after releasing it in a handful of U.S. theaters, then decides to make a fucking remake that’s going to vacuum from the original everything good and decent about it and reconstruct in its place some shambling barbarity filled with the usual Hollywood regurgitations of lame Hollywood jokes uttered by lame Hollywood actors endowed with too-bright Hollywood teeth and too-fake Hollywood tits — in short, an Armageddon or a Pearl Harbor with a sea monster.
I can’t decide if the American movie-going public is too xenophobic to have another race of people talking in their own language on their multiplex screens (for The Host really is a multiplex movie) or if it just kant reed no good. I suspect a little bit from Column A and a little bit from Column B. Either way, I am going to be in a punching-your-face mood when this remake premieres.
