We reviewed Meyer's novel, The Host, when it came out a year or so ago. And we were pleasantly surprised: It's a cheesy beach read, to be sure, but it's also a genuinely thought-provoking, fairly original science fiction story that manages to ask some questions about what it means to be human. So we're cautiously optimistic about Niccol's adaptation, to be produced by the people behind The Road.

There aren't that many stories which start with the Earth already having been vanquished totally by alien invaders — I can think of a few, most notably William Barton's When Heaven Felll — and Meyer has a neat twist on this premise. The Earth has been peacefully overtaken by parasites that control human host bodies. They're more peaceful and mellow than we are, and Earth under their rule has become a placid, rational place — it's not unlike if the pod people from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had won.

But Meyer adds another twist on top of that — which is really where The Host gets interesting. The alien parasites are "going native," and they're being influenced by their host bodies' desires and habits and ideas. It's not unlike the relationship between the Trills and their host bodies in Star Trek, except that the creatures in The Host are accustomed to taking over bodies that are more docile and easier to control, unlike our belligerent, adrenaline-and-hormone-ruled selves. The central love story in The Host is actually just our way into thinking about what it means for the alien invaders to go native — the invader known as Wanderer falls for the man her host body, Melanie, loves, and finds herself being subsumed into Melanie's identity rather than the other way around. She becomes a passenger in Melanie's body rather than the controller.

So... you have a story about a voyeur who lives inside a woman's body. You have a world where people are all controlled by creatures, but the boundary between controller and controlled is getting increasingly blurry. And you have a paranoid thriller about a seemingly perfect society that has cracks. It's not hard to imagine the man who brought us the panopticon nightmare of The Truman Show, the man-controlling-ideal-woman story of S1m0ne and the flawed-utopia of Gattaca making The Host into a great film. I'm actually eager to see what he does with it.

The only downside to a Niccol-directed The Host would be if it delays The Cross, the dystopian future movie he's already working on, which we ran some concept art from the other day. Here's hoping he finishes The Cross, and then creates a smarter, sharper version of Meyer's admittedly schlocky novel. It could be that rare movie adaptation that outshines the book. [Variety]

You could argue that most dystoipan movies are really false utopias, because the rulers of a dark, bleak dystopia (like, say, Brazil) still try to pretend that everything is perfect and wonderful. The difference is, most dystopias start out bleak and dark, and just get more horrid until the protagonist is forced to confront the darkness around him/her. But in the "false utopia" subcategory of dystopias, everything is bright and wonderful, and the main character is either getting some great drugs, or having lots of fun sex, or both in the case of Brave New World.

The "false utopia" genre, says Transparency Now,

shows humanity lost in false paradises of technology and simulation. In one subcategory, we see enclosed high-tech cities or habitations with apparently well-ordered societies full of people who are trapped by their dependence on automation and computers. They may also live decadent lifestyles that serve to distract them from the truth of their circumstances.

Here's a brief and cheerful history of fake utopias:

1909. "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster. Forster's reaction to some of H.G. Wells' more optimistic fiction. In the distant future, humans live underground, each in a separate "cell," with all of his or her needs provided for by the all-powerful Machine. Human culture stagnates, and people wrongly believe they can't survive on the surface of the Earth without protection. Over time, people start to worship the Machine like a god, forgetting they made it. And then eventually the Machine starts to break down.

1932. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It's 2540, and everybody's drugged up to the gills on Soma, a sort of anti-depressant/psychotropic, and people can learn in their sleep. There's lots and lots of casual sex and orgies, and people chanting "orgy porgy" while having orgies. It's awesome. Oh, and people are incubated artificially instead of being born "naturally." The lower classes are engineered to be less intelligent and curious than the upper classes.

1956. The City And The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a billion years in the future, and humans have mostly abandoned Earth to go off and create super-ultra-awesome minds in space. In the domed city of Diaspar, people lead perfect lives, governed by the Central Computer. When they die, the Computer stores their memories and grows new bodies for them, making them nearly immortal. But then it turns out humans have been lied to about why they have to stay on Earth.

1971. The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Ijon Tichy goes to sleep (or does he?) and wakes up in the trippy year of 2039, an utopian era without money or want. Everybody's mood is kept carefully controlled using drugs. Many people have pointed out the similarities of this drug-induced utopia to The Matrix: At one point, Tichy's girlfriend offers him a choice between two pills: The black pill will make him forget their relationship, the white pill will make him commit more deeply.

1976. Logan's Run, the movie based on the 1969 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Everything is perfect in the domed city, with all the casual sex and meaningless hedonism you could ever want. Machines provide for all of your needs, but there's one drawback — when you turn 30, you have to die.

1994. The Giver by Lois Lowry. In this award-winning young-adult novel, it's a perfect world: bad feelings and conflict have been eliminated, thanks to perfect communication and drugs. (It's always drugs.) People get around by bicycle, and there are very few cars or airplanes. Romantic love and sexual desire (called "stirrings") are illegal, and are suppressed via medication. Instead, couples are matched up based on compatibility and can adopt up to two children from "birth mothers": one boy and one girl. Here's a Christian review warning against this book based on a misconception that it's actually utopian.

1998. The Truman Show. Truman lives in a lovely small town, surrounded by nice people, with possibly the only job in the insurance industry that doesn't totally suck. The only problem is, he can never leave town, and he's kept scared of the ocean by a fake story about his father drowning. He doesn't realize that everything in his world is a lie, and he's really one of the Pussycat Dolls.

2002. Equilibrium. I hesitated to include this movie, because it's not much of a utopia. It's sort of bleak and nasty, and Christian Bale will do gun-aerobics in your face. But it does have many of the hallmarks, including people being drugged into flat affect-hood.

2005. The Island. Ewan McGregor lives in a utopian community where everything is perfect, and all of his choices are made for him. As usual in these types of stories, everybody's told that the rest of the world is uninhabitable due to some kind of toxic disaster. Everybody yearns to win the "Lottery" and go to "The Island," a tropical paradise — but it turns out The Island is made of people. Sort of.

THX-1138. Totally hairless dude? Check. Drugs keep him asexual and out of it? Check. Total childlike submission to authority, at least at first? Double check. Somewhere there's an adult baby touching himself to this movie right now.

Brazil. Jonathan Pryce wanders through most of the movie with a lost-little-boy look on his face. And when he dreams about fighting back, it's as a childish fantasy sword-hero who isn't all that effective. It takes Kim Greist and Robert DeNiro kicking his ass to get him to start taking matters into his own hands. The film presents his boyishness as lovable, even though it's a direct result of the oppressive system he lives in.

The Truman Show. The film audience loves Truman for much the same reason as his fictional viewers. His cute overgrown boy grin, his cutesy sayings. People watch him sleep, like a puppy. Everyone around him tries to keep him scared to go too far away from home, and his job as an insurance agent is all about clinging to security. He's a big kid.

The Island. Okay. Ewan McGregor and his fellow agnates wear pajamas. A "nannyish" computer scans their urine and monitors their diet. Black-clad guards rush over if male and female clones spend too much time touching each other. They're taught to fear the outside world, and they do as they're told, waiting to go to a storybook paradise called The Island. Basically, it's THX-1138 with hair.

Of course, all of these films end with our hero growing up and casting off the corporate/state apron-strings. Otherwise, they'd make for pretty dull viewing. But first, they linger lovingly over the spectacle of their heroes turned into kids, because all that regression provides an escapist thrill for us, the audience. And why not? Isn't that what's so seductive about authoritarian cultures in the first place?

Famous names: Peter Weir, Jim Carey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris

Crunchy goodness: 5

Stunt casting: Jim Carey, known mostly for slapsticky comedy, turns in an amazing performance as an unwitting sitcom star who wants nothing more than to face the drama of real life.

Copycats: There have been countless flicks about being trapped in a television show, from the irritating Pleasantville to the campy Stay Tuned, but none has done what The Truman Show does: extrapolate into the future what the hellish results could be of a present-day world obsessed with reality television, where people's lives are little more than the property of entertainment corporations.

The shit: Truman Show scribe Andrew Niccol wrote and directed contemporary SF classic Gattaca, as well as the slipstream arms-dealer flick Lord of War.

Truman as Archetype