Saturday, July 19, 2008

The Host (괴물)

Just finished watching "The Host" (aka 괴물 in korean). So I'd thought I'd take this chance to kick off a new blog of small movie reviews.

The movie was first introduced to me as the Korean Godzilla, a movie which has held some of the records for Korean film. Of course, the plot does involve a monster and water but the similarities end pretty quickly. The movie is obviously in Korean but there are English subtitles and an easy to follow dialog making it an easy movie to watch for foreign audiences.

There is plenty of humor in the cast as well as a good balance between action scenes and more of the paced story telling. The movie starts out with cheerful afternoon by the Han River but quickly develops into a national disaster zone. While the characters tend to fall into a few basic tropes they have their own little twists which makes the movie fun to follow and adds to the gung-ho attitude that dominates much of the film's progression.

The filming was not anything spectacular but they do manage to pull of some exceptionally good angles for some of the encounters making the film a bit suspenseful at moments. One of the more impressive aspects of the film includes the special effects (the creature itself is impressively crafted using CG). All in all, there is a polished feeling to the movie.

The final verdic: watch. It is good to see foreign films reaching this quality of production in film making and I look forward to more samplings of Korean films.

1 comment:

Tom Mitchell said...

Watched 괴물 the other day. I didn't know what to expect (I haven't seen too many monster movies nor very many Korean movies.)

Great Movie, it had a very refreshing style, I liked it a lot. I think monster films (most recently this one and Cloverfield) are becoming a favorite genre of mine.