Feeling excluded? At least your own family doesn’t suspect you of turning them over to the invaders after you’ve just staggered through a desert to find your uncle’s cavern hideaway. Worried about asking out that girl you like? Be glad you’re not living in a post–alien-invasion mind-control state, and that your crush hasn’t been taken over by an alien that looks vaguely like a glowing, spindly amoeba-or not, since at least the amoeba (safely contained in the body of a pretty young woman) is totally into you. It’s a melodrama for the age of Facebook “It’s complicated” status. Like many films aimed at audiences for whom braces, crushes, and out-of-control hormones are very real facts of life, The Host is marked by a strange balance of wish fulfillment and glad-it’s-not-me relationship chaos. It would’ve been good for us to have seen films like The Host once in a while.) (When I was in middle school, at least, we could only approve of movies that had a certain level of macho clout. It will probably have most to say to the teenage girls who up till now have been Meyers’s most loyal fan base, but there’s plenty there for the guys, too, if they see it, which seems unlikely.

For all its gestures towards sci-fi-as-political-allegory (shadowy government agencies, alien mind control, a dystopia that resembles a utopia), The Host is primarily concerned with a specific stage of adolescence-one in which sexual desire is very new, vaguely shameful, and above all deeply terrifying. I am not the target audience for Andrew Niccol’s new film The Host, adapted from the novel by Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame.

The host stephanie meyers