In a darkened movie theater, I discovered why a giant fish-salamander creature emerged from the Han River in Korea and ate a bunch of people. Apparently, it was because some U.S. military guys dumped more than 400 bottles of contaminated formaldehyde into the river near Seoul back in 2000. This sparked the mutant growth of an enormous amphibian with a multi-mouthed and impossibly toothy head.
No, really. In 2000, a civilian mortician named Albert McFarland was working at a U.S. military base outside Seoul and ordered his assistants to dump 120 liters of embalming fluid into the Han River. Millions in the Seoul region get their drinking water from the Han.
But it wasn't until 2006 that a quirky South Korean filmmaker named Bong Joon-ho converted this real-life event in a movie called The Host, which pits a family of good-hearted losers against a fictional giant monster unleashed by U.S. military pollution. The flick, with special effects outsourced to San Francisco shop The Orphanage among others, is part of a new generation of films in Korea that are the products of international collaboration. But the flick is also part of an old B-movie tradition of using gigantic, imaginary creatures to tell political stories about governments and societies gone awry.
One Korean critic hailed The Host as "Korea's first legitimate anti-American film," and Bong accepted this as high praise. Last year he told Cineaste that giant monster movies always have a little social commentary in them: "It's fun for me to bury my political comments here and there in a film, but this is also part of the tradition of the monster or sci-fi genre." Though the filmmaker worried that The Host's anti-American bent would alienate U.S. audiences, the movie has become a cult hit stateside since its March 9 release.
Bong and his fans have compared The Host to Jaws (1975) because both depict menacing creatures from the water whose human-chomping ways are being covered up by nothing-to-see-here bureaucrats. But I think it's more appropriate to place the flick squarely in the old-school giant monster genre with Godzilla (1954), King Kong (1933), It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) and countless others.
Like the big dino in Godzilla, The Host's raging mutant is linked explicitly to U.S. military intervention in Asia; like the many-tentacled sea monster from It Came From Beneath the Sea, our Korean mega-fish can only be defeated with the aid of strong, competent women who represent a new generation of modern citizens.
In typical monster movies, the creature is nearly always brought down by the government and/or military (think of King Kong's famous death-by-fighter-plane scene, for example, or nearly any Godzilla flick). But in The Host, the military and state authorities do everything they can to mislead the public about the menace. In fact, they further injure their citizenry by feigning that the monster has a virus, then dusting Seoul in toxic "Agent Yellow" to decontaminate the region. Bong's focus on menacingly incompetent government authorities makes his monster flick thoroughly modern, and puts it in a league with Danny Boyle's anti-military zombie scorcher 28 Days Later.
Instead of helping The Host's hero, Gang-du, rescue his daughter from the monster, government authorities detain and torture him with drills to "find the virus" that one U.S. doctor admits doesn't exist. With the help of his bow-hunting sister and Molotov-cocktail-hurling brother, Gang-du has to evade both the police and the monster to look for his daughter. It would seem that only the little guy and his family have the best interests of Seoul at heart -- the government could care less. Ultimately this creature feature is about something Bong says is a daily fact of Korean life: corruption. The movie translates so well into a U.S. context because many Americans suspect that's a daily fact of our lives too.
I've been a giant monster fan since I was about 5 years old, when my father plopped me down in front of our crappy old TV set to watch a Gamara movie. Fans of Japanese kaiju (monsters) already know what a treat I got that day: a Godzilla-size, kid-protecting turtle who flew by withdrawing into his shell, spurting fire out of his leg holes and spinning really really fast. I soon gobbled up as many Godzilla movies as I could on afternoon TV, as well as Giant Robot. I even got to see Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973) at the drive-in! My favorite giant monster was Ghidorah (three heads = best), and my favorite monster movies were Destroy All Planets (1968) and Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster (1972).
Even as a little kid, I got the social messages in between rooting for my favorite kaiju. Humans create their own giant monster enemies when they neglect children, make war and pollute the planet. Sometimes monsters come to your rescue. And sometimes people don't.
