THE HOST

It’s beginning to look a lot like America, everywhere you go. Take South Korea. Bleached blonde haired slackers, cell phones, gangsters, television and fast food galore. Also ineffective governments; ours can’t handle a monster of a hurricane, theirs can’t handle the real thing.

Joon-ho Bong is South Korea’s Steven Spielberg, (a major influence on Mr. Bong as well) and The Host is his Jaws. Both directors have enormous talent and their films make money. The Host has become South Korea’s top grossing movie of all time. His brilliant 2004 Memories of Murder was a true crimer about another monster, this time a real one--a serial killer who was never apprehended. In both movies Bong directs with sly wit, jolting scares, and sharp jabs at Korean life.

The Host opens with an obnoxious American military scientist insisting on dumping hundreds of unused, dusty formaldehyde bottles into Seoul’s Han River despite the fears of his Korean assistant. BFP wonders if the title alludes to South Korea being “host” to the American military virus.

Cut to a lazy summer day at the shore some months or years later. Interrupting the seaside calm is the emergence from the deep of a giant lizard, athletic and graceful. What at first seems spectacular to the beach-goers becomes terrifying as the monster starts gorging itself on them. Gang-du, who, when he’s not sleeping, runs a snack-stand, takes his teenaged daughter, Hyeon-su, in-hand to flee the mutant creature. But amid the panicked throngs, he loses hold of her. Frantic, he spots her anew and grasps her hand. The camera pulls back, however, to reveal Gang-du has taken hold of another girl wearing the same school uniform. Typical Bong: We laugh as we scream.

The saurian does not eat all its prey at once. Some it regurgitates, depositing them into an undersea grotto, presumably saving them for midnight snacks. Among those stored is Hyeon-su. Gang-du’s family, nicely rendered by Bong, consists of his ineffectual father; his brother, an unemployed college graduate with an affinity for alcohol and whining, and an archery obsessed sister. When not arguing with each other, (Manhola Dargis points out they don’t seem all that different from the family in Little Miss Sunshine.) they all understandably believe Hyeon-su is dead. Then they begin receiving calls from her on their cell phones. With callous scientists and inept police behaving nearly as badly as the monster, the film becomes a frenzied search as Gang-du and his siblings scramble to locate and rescue Hyeon-su .

The Host wraps as a triumph of cross-cutting and fast-paced, clever action script-writing. Koreans, like Americans, obviously love blockbusters. And like Mr. Spielberg here, they have at least one director who knows how to make them.