Cinema: Gwoemul (The Host) (2006)
Volver started about half an hour later than we’d expected, and the end credits started to roll at about 11:55pm – and I was supposed to be at Ryerson for Gwoemul (The Host) at midnight! I got out of there as quickly as possible to find that it was pouring outside – luckily, I’d brought my ‘brelly. It took ten minutes to catch a cab, and then anther ten minutes to get from Roy Thompson Hall to Ryerson Theatre – I ran into the building and the movie had started about a minute ago. Phew!
This was a Midnight Madness screening, so it attracts hardcore fans of the genre. The audience was so excited and burst into applause many times throught the film. It was a pretty rowdy crowd but it was all in good fun.
The film was great. It’s a monster movie, about an odd family of a father and his three children who don’t get along very well. One of the siblings is a single father, whose daughter is captured by this big monster. There is a hilarious scene of the family grieving for their loss that only the wackiness of Oriental cinema could have brought.
The monster is believed to be the host of a deadly virus, so everybody who has come into contact with it need to be decontaminated and quarantined. But, the single father’s cell phone suddenly rings, and it is his daughter! From here on, the film is about this family escaping the quarantine and searching the city’s sewers for their lost girl.
The film is quite funny and I wasn’t expecting that. There are also a lot of political overtones regarding the way the virus contamination was assessed and handled, not to mention the unmentioned but implied reasons for the monster’s existence. The US Military had a fairly large presence in the film. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire monster thing was a metaphor for the reality of nuclear weapons, etc.
Last but not least: the monster. One thing that struck me was the monster’s size. It was not a gigantic Godzilla/King Kong/etc type of monster. It was relatively small, and was pretty agile underwater, but I think it can only breathe above water. Anyway, the special effects went from pretty good to almost awesome; basically, despite working with three of the best special effects units in the world (Weta Workshop, Creature Workshop and The Orphanage), you can still see the difference between an $8 miillion budget and a $100 million budget.
The heart and soul of this film, however, is not in the visuals, but in the characters. It goes all-out in this respect and I’m sure that, fun action aside, this is what made this South Korea’s biggest box-office success of all time. Unfortunately, there are already rumors of a US remake…
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