Twilight
Ok fangirls, bring on the hatemail!!
Or would I get any for thinking the movie of “Twilight”- based on the phenomenon-starting best-seller by Stephanie Meyer- is amateurish, silly, and sometimes just downright bad? On the one hand, I’m glad I haven’t yet read the book so I can take the movie purely as that, but on the other hand, there are times when the movie- directed by Catherine Hardwicke (who did a better teenage angst movie in “Thirteen”)- seems to lose the aspects of Meyer’s book that have made many a woman swoon.
One thing can comes through right and clear is that the love story between Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), a lonely and forlorn high schooler who moves up to Washington to live with her father (Billy Burke) for a while, and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, who was Cedric in the “Harry Potter” films), an angst-ridden teenage vampire who finds both his heart and his dark desires stirred by Bella, is the new Leo and Kate for this generation. That sometimes has a hard time coming through in the performances- which range from indifference to uncertainty to some sense of desire in their facial expressions- but I’d fault that more on Hardwicke’s direction (and a screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg that reads like a more generic teen movie) than I would the performances of Stewart and Pattinson, who’ve shown in the past themselves capable of better work.
The thing is, the story is certainly the thing of Gothic tragedy from the first scenes with Bella and Edward, paired up as lab partners in biology class, exchanging heated glances and awkward small talk. And the stage is set for a lot of tragedy (of course, we do have three books to go; be patient). There’s not a lot in this movie. Basically it’s an origin story, setting the stage for darkness to come while establishing the characters in a slightly mundane story that introduces Bella into Edward’s world. So we get hints of Native American werewolves (like Bella’s bud Jacob) without actually seeing anyone wolf out. We get a family of vampires who have a very open home (lots of windows; even in a rarely sunny place like Washington, it would seem like a health risk) whose hobbies include playing baseball, and who are cordial enough to prepare a salad for Bella when she comes to visit. I guess they’re doing a good job of adaptation. We do get some sense of the dark lives led by the Cullens when a rogue vampire catches Bella’s scent, forcing Edward and the rest of the clan into action to protect her, though there is some resentment by some of them.
Other than that, it’s a humdrum teenage angst story posing as ravishing romance. Maybe the book is better (hopefully, the book is better). Certainly “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was. Joss Whedon and his writers achieved the gold standard for modernizing the dark tragedy of vampirism in that iconic series, with the recent Swedish cult hit “Let the Right One In” coming in a close second. This movie is just an exercise in cashing in on a phenomenon, and with so many of the secondary characters hitting all the wrong notes in terms of teen movie cliches without being allowed a chance to breathe, Hardwicke (who nonetheless received an intriguing and typically-great score by Carter Burwell) may have on the surface brought the book to life. Unfortunately, a lot of what we see on the screen is pretty lifeless.
Maybe the next film will be better.
