After another misstep with his return to sci-fi "In Time," Andrew Niccol has turned to something a bit safer, adapting "Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer's "The Host." While the film doesn't seem to generating the same levels of excitement as Meyer's bloodsucker movies or fellow young adult novel "The Hunger Games," they have gone for the same formula with two fresh-faced male leads (Max Irons and Jake Abel) and an empathetic female (Saoirse Ronan) as the audience's surrogate at the story's heart.
We now have two new images from the film featuring newcomer Abel as well as Ronan who star in the story set in a world where alien parasite “souls” benevolently take over the consciousness of humans. One such “soul” named Wanderer inhabits the body of a dying woman, Melanie Stryder (Ronan), who just happens to be obsessed with finding the last group of surviving humans. Diane Kruger, William Hurt and Boyd Holbrook are also part of cast.
If worlds where vampires sparkle and kids fight each other to the death for entertainment can bring in the bucks, this should be fine, right? At any rate, you can bet Open Road is hoping all those people who kept the novel on the NY Times' best-seller list for 26 weeks buy a ticket when the film opens on March 19th next year. [EW]