You have to admire Stephanie Meyer for knowing her craft. Unfortunately, her craft is overly chaste teenage melodrama that centres around some kind of love triangle clumsily draped on a fantasy-themed story. With The Host, we get the Twi-fied version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and if that sounds terrible in the description, it’s even worse in the execution, trust me.
Our plucky heroine is implanted with an alien symbiote, but rather than thoughts of rebellion or revolution, we have the human Melanie in love with one hunky boy, and the alien Wanderer in love with another. Say what you want about Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, but at least you can tell them apart; the boy toys of The Host come from such a shallow gene pool, you need a scorecard to know who’s who.
No one accused Twilight of being Shakespeare, but its cast had actual chemistry, and when you’re a high school vampire romance story, you’re allowed to get away with being a tad soapy. But if you’re an alien invasion movie with a major plot about human resistance and the nature of identity, it’s best that you don’t squander the majority of your time on what boy the heroine should kiss.
