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63A silly, if fun, futuristic sci-fi romance.
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63The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.
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63The Host is top-heavy with profound, sonorous conversations, all tending to sound like farewells. The movie is so consistently pitched at the same note, indeed, that the structure robs it of possibilities for dramatic tension.
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60The Host gets bogged down in its “who’s kissing whom now?” dynamics, and it becomes all too easy to snicker at it.
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60An "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" retread told from a postoccupation vantage point, this adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s YA romance novel unfolds in a dystopian future when alien parasites have nearly won the battle for Earth.
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58The Host is a step up from the endless metaphorical lectures and gaping plot holes of Niccol’s last film, In Time, but its muffled emotions, delivered with Twilight-esque blank-eyed calm, put it in the same category of a creative idea hamstrung in execution.
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50As with the Twilight series, The Host's infelicities—drab dialogue, ridiculous plotting, more emotional crises than there is story—are enlivened by its thematic eccentricities.
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50Saoirse Ronan's talents are wasted on a foolish dual part in this dull sci-fi fantasy.
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50There's something about novelist Stephenie Meyer that induces formerly interesting directors to suddenly make films that are slow, silly and soporific.
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Mar 28, 201350Extravagantly silly but undeniably entertaining sci-fi soap opera.
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50'Twilight' of the Body Snatchers, without much urgency or sexual heat.
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42The Host doesn't strive for social allegory, as previous body snatcher flicks have done with the Red Scare, civil rights and Watergate. If anything it's merely a teenage girl's fantasy checklist for prom.
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40This film adaptation feels like YA, with cat’s-cradle love matches, soft-focus sexuality, and a main character who never satisfactorily makes the transition from page to screen.
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40Niccol and Meyer -- who co-produces this, her first post-"Twilight" film -- choose to trade away any shred of the ripe social subtext that has made other body-snatcher films so rich. In its place: the kind of supernatural, star-crossed romance that generates so much swooning from Team "Twilight."
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40Watch closely and you might even spy a better film inside, straining to break free.
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40The movie, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer of “Twilight” fame and directed by Andrew Niccol, is just kind of dumb. Like the more famous books and movies, about a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf and a human girl, it often plays like a teenage girl’s idea of how literary romances play out.
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38To work, The Host would have required a visionary interpretation rather than the mundane telling that Niccol opts for.
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38The Host basically comes down to a vote for Team Jared or Team Ian. I voted myself into oblivion about half an hour in. Niccol, who once added mystery and suspense to the sci-fi of 1997's "Gattaca," is no match for the giant marshmallow that is The Host.
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37It’s a mushy and unsuspenseful melodrama.
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30The story goes slack onscreen, so much so that the movie's two-plus hours will seem an eternity.
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30Dopey, derivative and dull, The Host is a brazen combination of unoriginal science-fiction themes, young-adult pandering and bottom-line calculation. That sounds like it should work (really!), but it never does, largely because the story is as drained of energy as are its moony aliens.
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25Ronan, youthfully elegant as always, tries hard, but the material defeats her.
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Mar 28, 201325Its title, very graciously, doesn't end with a "Part 1," but The Host sure has enough plot points and ideas to fill two installments.
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25A long, tedious and often unintentionally hilarious adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s sci-fi follow-up.
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25An invasion of the body snatchers is preferable to realizing that the true horror perpetrated here is not on the characters but on the audience.
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25The film may as well be titled "Stephenie Meyer's Waiting Around."
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Apr 7, 201320Steven Spielberg famously retained his childhood sense of wonder. On this evidence, Meyer has maintained a nine-year-old's notion of titillating romance.
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0It's really a dramatic sinkhole.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 29
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Mixed: 5 out of 29
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Negative: 8 out of 29
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10This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.