SAOIRSE RONAN IN THE HOST

year: 2013 cast: Saoirse Ronan, Diane Kruger, William Hurt rating: *1/2

Young ladies, if you’re having trouble choosing the right guy, frantically pontificating who’s best suited to meet your needs – and ultimately steal your heart – you might not be completely alone. A parasite from another planet could have taken over your body; your body serving as THE HOST... possibly the worst science fiction film ever created for the teenage market.

Poster of THE HOST

Beginning with the plot underway: the Earth is already controlled by bright blue-eyed aliens wearing human bodies who, although peaceful enough on their own or with each other, are liken to Nazis when it comes to taking over. After all, they need to get every last skin-suit to run the entire planet their way.

One person in particular is Melanie, played by the lanky and otherwise talented HANNA actress Saoirse Ronan, who survives a suicidal leap from a skyscraper and then, after receiving the alien transplant, she doesn’t completely adhere to this new soul transition, an operation with the underlying purpose of – chaperoned by Diane Kruger’s antagonistic Seeker – discovering where the remaining survivors are hiding.

What makes this movie such a campy howler are the frantic mental conversations between Melanie's human side against her alien half, named The Wanderer and shortened to Wanda after being saved by her Uncle Jeb (William Hurt) in the scorching desert. A resilient Jeb leads a ragtag human army in an underground maze of caverns, and although not trusted at first, and mistreated by several of her human captors, Melanie/Wanda continues to argue with herself over escape, betrayal and ultimately which dude to crush on: the first being her former lover and the second a really nice guy who’s fallen for not Melanie, but Wanda. (Meanwhile Melanie, whose thoughts often sound like a perturbed valley girl, is downright pissed!)

Turning sports cars and helicopters into silver bulletproof vehicles is the only real effort to make this unintentionally hilarious navel-gazing INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS an action-based sci-fi flick. The production value resembles a low-budget cinematic effort or perhaps an expensive straight-to-DVD venture. And as for being considered a worthy teen romance, Melanie/Wanda hardly knows her boys long enough for the “relationships” to matter: the sappy conversations make TWILIGHT (also by Stephanie Meyer) seem like GONE WITH THE WIND in comparison.