(No explicit spoilers, but spoiler-sensitive readers should watch the movie first and come back later.)

A monstrous crisis in South Korean national identity.

On the surface, The Host looks a lot like any other monster movie. It showcases an evil beast hell-bent on the destruction of the local population. And yet, even here director Joon-ho Bong refuses the conventions of the genre he’s working within. He shows us the monster right from the start (almost in the first scene) and almost always in broad daylight rather than hiding the special effects in dark nighttime shots. Rather than glorifying the monster’s destruction (the disaster porn model) or reveling in the fear it creates (the horror model), he pitches the film at…

All of Bong Joon-ho’s movies are about monsters, some more literally than others. In “Memories of Murder,” the monster is the boogeyman, ripped from the headlines and hiding in the darkness. In “Snowpiercer,” the monster is the abstract force of capitalism, rotting us from the inside out as we eat each other to survive and maintain some semblance of order at the end of the world. And in “The Host,” the wild 2006 genre mash-up that firmly established Bong as a creative force of nature and afforded him the cache to make “Mother” in 2009, the monster is… well, it’s an actual fucking monster, with slimy skin and a prehensile tail and a sweet tooth for small children.

The special…

What do you do if you're Bong Joon-ho and you've just made Memories of Murder, one of the single most devastating portrayals of police brutality and serial killers ever put to screen? (seriously, my eyes are welling up thinking about it. Watch it.)

The answer is go for an insane comedy-drama monster movie about a fucked up family who're on a mission to hunt down a monster causing mayhem and murder on the banks of the Han river in Seoul.

Throw in some clever political commentary about police incompetence in Korea, the US military's flippantly arrogant policies abroad (and how the Korean government typically kowtows to them), and government bunglings in general for good measure.

Test the family at every…

The history between Korea and the United States predates the Korean war itself (1950-1953), which implied the invasion executed by North Korea, with the aid of China and the Soviet Union, against South Korea, the latter having United States as the principal force through the provision of approximately 88% of the military personnel of the United Nations. It even goes back to the Cairo Conference of 1943, where the United States, the United Kingdom and China decided "in due course Korea shall become free and independent." However, to talk about The Host, directed by Joon-ho Bong, responsible for one of the most pervasively complete crime and detective procedural movies ever made, compels the reviewer to at least reference briefly the…

A monster movie that has so much more to say than your average horror movie. We see the direct consequences of careless treatment of the environment in Korea perpetuated by Americans, and the ensuing chaos and refusal of responsibility. 

Almost everyone in this movie is a bumbling idiot, with the young daughter is the only one who shows any resourcefulness. Truthfully these people were almost TOO dumb to believe, but maybe that’s what Bong Joon-ho was going for? To me, this was a way to show how those in power continue to indiscriminately fuck up the planet, and by proxy fuck up the future for their own children. You can tell Bong Joon-ho  cares a lot about our planet and…