I’m not sure that the sympathetic monster is anything new. King Kong may have been planned as a terrifying beast, but audiences found him sympathetic, a tragic figure, so much so that the hurriedly-produced sequel adjusts its ape to become a friendly, heroic character. There’s still space for you to interpret his death as a welcome relief, the vanquishing of a deadly threat, but audiences today will usually take it differently and see the death of Kong as an injustice, not because he didn’t need to be stopped, but because he shouldn’t have been extracted from his habitat in the first place. Ray Harryhausen’s monsters always showed their agony when they died. Maybe that’s something that later spectators have come to, but the emotive skill of the animators works against the films’ intentions if they’d aimed to create evil incarnate.

You’re right about the ending of The Host – it’s definitely significant that basic ingenuity and simple weapons win the day. Military force is certainly not vindicated. It shares that with all versions of War of the Worlds – if H.G. Wells wanted to show up the hubris of British imperialism, what better way than to show Britain invaded by another technologised brute force, one which is too arrogant to bother checking if its immune systems could cope with Earthly microbes. Humankind rescued by no action of its own.

I’ve been writing about Cloverfield at the moment, and if the monster in that has any motivation, it’s not communicated to the audience. But it’s interesting how many commentators see it as an abused creature blundering through Manhattan and tormented by the military, rather than as a malicious, parasitical predator. We never find out whether it’s looking for food or revenge or whatever…