Enviro movie of the year?

A review of The Host

Posted by Kit Stolz (Guest Contributor) at 3:29 PM on 16 Nov 2007

Read more about: movies | water pollution | waste | toxics

What is an environmental movie? Is it a movie that uses the beauty of wilderness to make us fall in love with the earth, as for example Into the Wild, or Brokeback Mountain? Is it a movie that explicitly tackles an environmental issue, such as Erin Brockovich, or The China Syndrome?

Or is it a picture that exploits the power of raw film to open up an environmental theme -- such as the risk of radiation -- with sheer imagination, such as (the original) Godzilla?

It's a rhetorical question, but one with an inescapable answer: all of the above count as environmental movies, each in its own way, some better than others. And if this is true, as it surely is, than the best environmental movie of the year may turn out to be an unlikely candidate: the mesmerizing -- and funny -- Korean movie released internationally this year, The Host.

Though essentially a cheesy horror movie, it's phenomenally well-directed, and to date has been the best-reviewed foreign film of the year.

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, hardly known for his raves, gushed that "there will be plenty of filmgoers who yawned through 'Godzilla' in 1998 and swore off large amphibians for good. All I can say, to tempt them back, is that I have seen 'The Host' twice and have every intention of watching it again." The New York Times compared the director to Steven Spielberg, favorably, likened the humor in the film to Little Miss Sunshine, and explicitly noted the environmental theme:

... the film reminds me less of the usual splatter entertainments that clutter American movie theaters and more of another recent horror film, the one in which a newly thawed alien with a giant brain delivers apocalyptic warnings to humanity about its imminent future. I'm talking of course about the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

The Village Voice compared the director Bong Joon-ho to Sergei Eisenstein, for crying out loud, and New York magazine called it "one of the greatest monster movies ever made."

Here's the enviro part: the opening scene, shot in a cool, distant, almost-documentary style, shows an American doctor working with a young Korean doctor in a morgue on an American military base in Seoul. The American doctor notices that dust has collected on the morgue's supply of formaldehyde bottles, and orders the Korean doctor to pour the deadly, mutagenic chemical down the drain, even though the Korean doctor protests that it will go directly to the Han River, and that it's against regulations. The American doctor sneers: "The Han River is very broad -- let us be broad-minded, Mr. Kim." So the Korean pours the toxin down the drain, and the horror beings.

Astonishingly, this is not a fictional scene. Explained the director Joon-ho to Cineaste:

It was a double blessing for me to convey some political commentary in the film and have it work within a genre. For instance, the opening scene, when the two scientists are pouring chemicals into the Han River refers to an actual event that took place six years ago. But at the same time it's a very typical monster movie opening.

Now insiders report that the new Frank Darabont/Stephen King movie about to be released, The Mist, is actually a rip-off of this modern classic, and far inferior. What a shock!

A word to the wise: rent the DVD and see the original, before some overbaked Hollywood imitation ruins it for you. The Host is a little strange at times, it's bizarrely funny, and it has a monster that looks like some demented kind of oversized oyster sex, but as David Edelstein wisely noted:

In the end, though, this is a real horror movie. It's hard to shake off the first sight of the creature in the far distance, hanging from the side of a bridge like some kind of pupa, then dropping into the water and gliding toward shore (to the oohs and ahhhs of the dopes on the bank, who throw food to it). When Hyun-seo becomes the mother she never had to a homeless orphan who's still alive when he's dumped into the monster's bloody pit, The Host leaves the realm of its campy modern counterparts. But then, despite cartoonish flourishes, it has never functioned at the level of movies like Tremors or Eight Legged Freaks or even Jurassic Park. This is a portrait of a country's deepest anxieties, which just happen to be distilled into a mandibled squidlike reptile. It has the tang of social realism.

A word to the wise: on the DVD, choose the subtitled Korean version (that was shown in theaters over here), not the dubbed American version, which sounds as if five actors chosen at random were put in a room to ad lib dialogue in English. But most importantly, if you like good movies -- don't miss it.

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"giant alien thawed brain"?

Poor Al! Not for nothing do I avoid reviews in the NYTimes.

Thanks, Kit, for recommending "The Host." And I trust Anthony Lane's recommendation too. As a rule, I stay far far away from horror movies; it was, I think, when I saw "Aliens" that I said, "Enough is enough!" But in the case of "The Host," perhaps it is time to make an exception.

The category "environmental movie" is, as you suggest, perhaps rather too capacious and unwieldy to be all that useful. Your three sub-categories are all fine, but only the second is likely to be generally recognized as being "environmental."

The first is very subtle. More, maybe, on that later.

And even movies belonging to the third sub-category -- in which human beings do something technologically fancy, or foolishly go where no man has gone before, and are punished for their arrogance, negligence and greed by some product for which they are not prepared -- might only be considered "environmental" by those with eyes to see.

It is curious how what we personally bring to a movie determines what we think it is about. Is "King Kong" an anti-colonialist allegory? Well, perhaps. Is "Apocalypse Now" an anti-war movie? Not according to the young Marines in "Jarhead"; that no longer human, no longer unquestionably intelligent species, for whom killing, rape and defending one's honor are activities of the highest value, thoughtlessness is the mother of all virtues, and meaning has no meaning, are shown the scene of the mad helicopter commander Robert Duval destroying the peaceable Vietnamese village, and madly hoot their approval.

So, is, say, "Jurassic Park" an environmentalist movie of this third sub-category? Well, it is about what can go wrong when you fool around with genes, so yes. But does anyone really go away with the message that we should not fool around with genes? The chaos theoretician Malcolm prophesies Cassandra-like that something will inevitably go wrong. In fact two things go wrong: human corruption sabotages the defense system, and the dinosaurs reproduce by parthenogenesis. But so what? Does any of us learn our lesson? Does any of us really want all the dinosaurs destroyed once and for all, which is Crichton's off-stage ending? No, we continue to believe that all that is required for living happily ever after with dinosaurs is knowing how to control them better. Hence, we get the quite unsurprising stories of JP II and III.

From another angle, consider three movies made in 1954. "Gojira," aka "Godzilla," features a giant irradiated old-generation T. rex knock-off, with a sweet tooth for Japanese urban architecture. "Them!" features giant irradiated ants, with catholic tastes. So are we impressed by the anti-nuke message? Well, maybe, but certainly not along the lines of the prophetic "China Syndrome." Certainly "Godzilla" looks back to the horrors of August, 1945, and the ants come out of an atom-bomb test site in the desert, and so they function more as anti-war allegories than as environmental message pictures.

The third movie of 1954 is a not very good drama starring Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Finch, "Elephant Walk." It takes place mostly in British Ceylon, on a plantation; one basic circumstance is that the late planter, Finch's father, built a palatial bungalow athwart the traditional path of a herd of indignant elephants; [spoiler alert!!!] the elephants re-assert themselves at the end -- and so this curious love story becomes a distant ancestor of "Jurassic Park."

Ironically, although "Elephant Walk" is not exactly pro-elephant, it clearly enough envisions what sorts of things can go wrong when human beings push into the habitat of potentially dangerous animals. This is precisely what is happening now with elephants in Assam, and in a few places in Africa.

And as my new hero, the adorably unapologetic elasmobranchophile-on-a-mission Rob Stewart (see on "Sharkwater," in Andrew Sharpless's last "This week in ocean news" post), points out, elephants have always killed lots more human beings than sharks ever have.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 2:28 PM on 17 Nov 2007

binding us to the planet

Thanks as always for your illuminating discussion...the first category of enviro movie I borrowed (and altered slightly) from Annie Proulx, who a couple of years ago discussed how great Western landscapes can "bind us to the earth." I think it's too important an idea to forget:

http://achangeinthewind.typepad.com/achangeinthewind/2006 ...

by Kit Stolz at 9:55 AM on 18 Nov 2007
[ Parent ]

landscapes, Western or other

Right, Kit, I know what you are saying about the first sub-category. Subtle as it is, I entirely accept that it counts as an important group of movies that deserve to be called "environmental." And believe me, since your very interesting earlier post on Chris McCandless and "Into the Wild," I have been thinking a fair amount on what the moral role of landscape in movies is, and how it can be interpreted.

So sure, every conventional Western, necessarily having huge outdoors shots with attention given to the shape and texture of the earth, has an environmental dimension. And perhaps since early movie-makers could find such landscapes in the vicinity of Los Angeles, that was one of the reasons why the movie industry ended up in Hollywood.

Of course, it is not only Western landscapes that should be counted. Movies with John Barry soundtracks, for example, tend to have related effects: not only the Western "Dances With Wolves," for example, but also "Born Free," and "Out of Africa."

For that matter, if the viewer's receptivity to the spectacle of the landscape-in-itself can be separated from how Westerns use it as a significantly set and lit stage, even a character (e.g., famously, the desert and rocky towers of southeastern Utah playing the part of Comanche territory in Texas, in "The Searchers"), we may need to open up a sub-sub-category, containing such vivid nature documentaries as the IMAX movies, which are usually not received as equivalent or comparable works of art.

Your inclusion of "Brokeback Mountain," with Annie Proulx's interesting but enigmatic comment, adds more depth to this discussion. In her book of stories of which "Brokeback Mountain" is the last, "Close Range: Wyoming Stories," Wyoming comes across as an unbreakably hard country, which tends to render its human inhabitants savage and ugly. Is any of her characters actually improved, morally or spiritually, by having to live in Wyoming, and cope with its hardness and isolation? The stories contain a fair amount of straight sex, and it is never romantically ideal, beautiful, ennobling or exalting; it is always something brutal, or foolish, a power play, or a cry of desperation. It is as though Proulx is saying, Wyoming turns human beings into beasts; there is no happiness in Wyoming; human beings should not attempt to live in Wyoming; they should go away, and leave Wyoming alone.

Or such is the moral that I draw, confusedly, from this remarkable writer, who herself chooses to live in Wyoming, and who by terrific coincidence served on the jury at the trial of Matthew Shepard's murderers.

In "Brokeback Mountain," by contrast, both the story and the movie, the love between Ennis and Jack is a supreme, or rather unique, occasion of joy. And in the movie especially, the amazing mountains provide the scenery for that joy. We note the powerful contrast they offer, to the dark little apartment of Ennis and his wife, the silly pretentious house of Jack and his wife, and the bleak farmhouse of Jack's parents. But at the same time, they are associated with lying, even cowardice. While Jack and Ennis carry on their affair, the mountains provide them with an excuse, a cover-story that they are really engaged in appropriately manly recreation in the wilderness. Brokeback Mountain cannot save Jack and Ennis; it is a weak, temporary refuge; or, it is false, it does nothing really to help them. It is no more than a monument to their desperate loneliness.

More later, on "Into the Wild."

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 3:41 PM on 18 Nov 2007

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