Plans
are afoot to make Stephanie Meyer’s 2008 science fiction novel, The
Host, into a movie . . .
According to recent news reports producers Nick
Wechsler, Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz have put up their own money to pay
for the screen rights to Stephanie Meyer's The Host novel. Andrew
Niccol (Gattaca,
Truman Show) will write and direct it. No
news as yet on casting or release dates although a 2012 release date seems
likely.
Stephanie Meyer is of course the author of the hugely
popular Twilight best-selling novels, which
are the basis of a highly lucrative film franchise right now. Twilight
turned out to be one of last year’s unexpected box office hits and a
sequel titled The Twilight Saga: New Moon is set to hit movie
theatres in the States and elsewhere on 20 November of this year. A third
movie, Eclipse, is planned for 2010. (They sure don’t waste time!)
The Twilight books are hugely popular with
teenaged girls and an argument could be made that the novels are actually
metaphors for when it is OK to lose one’s virginity. (Meyer is a Mormon, a
religiously conservative group in America. One commentator called her
oeuvre the “erotics of abstinence.”) To be honest we didn’t particularly
like the Twilight movie. Vampires that glitter? That hokey baseball game?
Actress Kristen Stewart’s incessant pouting? Then again, being male I
don’t exactly fall in the books’ intended target demographic. Men don’t
really care about that whole “when is it OK to have sex?” issue. After
all, women need a reason for having sex, men just need a place as Billy
Crystal remarked in City Slickers.
(Incidentally, I don’t believe that the Twilight
movie’s huge success had anything to do with Stephanie Meyer’s cult
following. Besides, who reads nowadays? Sure, the movie may have an had
in-built audience in the guise of people who read the book, but the real
secret behind its success lies with the casting of dreamy dude Robert
Pattinson as the male lead. The teenaged girls in the cinema I saw the
movie audibly gasped when he made his first onscreen appearance! Female
teenage hormonal imbalances sell movie tickets – ask James Cameron,
director of Titanic . . .)
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"Invasion of the Body Snatchers as told from the
perspective of one of the body snatchers . . ."
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So when it was announced that The Host will be
made into a movie I wasn’t exactly looking forward to reading Meyer’s
novel for this article series. Sure, it’s not fair to judge someone’s
literary output by a movie adaptation of their work. (By that yardstick
Isaac Asimov should be a lousy writer if the
I, Robot movie is anything to go by!) But I’m just human here, you
know.
Still, to be honest The Host pleasantly surprised
me. It was much better than I expected: slickly written and well-thought
out. For starters, the novel boasts a genuinely interesting and original
sci-fi concept. It can be summed up as “Invasion
of the Body Snatchers as retold from the perspective of one of the
alien body snatchers . . .”
In the near future most of Earth’s human population have
been taken over by a race of parasitic aliens calling themselves “souls.”
These aliens are more like the invaders in Heinlein’s
The Puppet Masters (made into a movie in
1994) and Invaders from Mars (1958,
and remade in 1986 by Tobe Hooper) than they are like the ones in the
various Invasion of the Body Snatchers
movies. In Invasion of the body Snatchers
humans are replaced by alien “duplicates.” In The Host and the
other movies mentioned here, human bodies are “taken over” or “possessed”
by aliens creatures that are surgically inserted in the base of their
necks.
When the book starts the invasion has been over for
several years. Except for a handful of humans who are in hiding, most
humans have been assimilated. The Host is a first-person
perspective tale recounted from the point of view of an alien soul named
“Wanderer.” The alien is called that because it (she?) has lived several
lives on other planets also conquered by the aliens. In the first chapter
the worm-like alien is being surgically implanted into the body of Melanie
Stryder, a teenage girl who was among the handful of human hold-outs and
only recently captured by alien “Seekers”.
Pretty much like in the 1978 remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
it seems that humanity never knew what hit them! Many humans were
assimilated before they even knew there was an alien invasion. Some humans
realized what was happening when the daily news broadcasts became all
mushy with human interest stories. Except for invading other planets and
wiping out entire races, it would seem that the alien invaders are
actually a peaceable lot and nowhere as violent as humans. Or maybe they
just don’t pick on their own kind . . .
Next: "As if Ned Flanders
decided to try his hand at writing science fiction . . ."
