Review: “Twilight”
An actor faces a lot of pressure when tapped to embody a beloved fictional character. But try living up to fan expectations when the author who birthed said character describes him as “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful,” with a “musical voice” and “soft, enchanting laugh.”
Those adjectives -- along with many, many others that reiterate his perfection -- add up to Edward Cullen, the heartthrob teenage vampire who helped Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series become exalted as “the next Harry Potter.” Which would be accurate, if only the novels were better written. And the stories appealed to boys as well as giggly girls (albeit of all ages, apparently). And -- most crucial -- if the franchise's inaugural big-screen adaptation by director Catherine Hardwicke didn't suck more than its vampires actually do.
Twilight is not Bram Stoker's Dracula. Meyer threw out all the vampiric rules to make Edward (Robert Pattinson) and the other baby Nosferatus in his family sexier, more glam -- because, ew, who'd want to read about a hottie who weakens or combusts in sunlight when he could just, well, sparkle instead? Yes, when Edward insists on showing his new love, a mortal named Bella (Kristen Stewart), what he looks like when the sky's not gray, you might expect something frightening. Instead, he glistens as if covered with Urban Decay glitter. Dreamy! And forget about needing to be invited into someone's home. Edward pops up in Bella's bedroom whenever he feels like it, which is totally hot.
Really, though, Twilight is Bella's story, and scripter Melissa Rosenberg (Step Up) does a fair-to-inadequate job translating the novel's first-person introspection to the screen. Bella is a junior in high school who's moved from her native Phoenix to Forks, Wash., to live with her father, whom she irritatingly calls Charlie (Billy Burke). She hates the rain and the goofy guys who hit on her, but nonetheless becomes friends with the goofiest of the lot, Mike, and the girl who's crushing on him, Jessica (Michael Welch and the usually bitch-cast Anna Kedrick, both of whom give the truest portrayals of their literary origins even in their reduced roles).
Bella stops minding the perpetually overcast weather, though, when she becomes drawn to Edward, a master at playing hard-to-get who hangs only with the rest of his pale, odd foster siblings and nearly busts a dusty blood vessel when Bella ends up sitting next to him in biology class. He glowers and clenches his fists; she naturally swoons, even though it's a love-hate thing for a while because she doesn't understand how someone could act so angry at her when they haven't even spoken.
Edward soon softens around Bella and eventually reveals a few of his quirks: One, his eyes change color. Two, he and his family skip school to go “camping” on sunny days. And three, Edward had to ball his fists and storm out of bio because he was pretty close to chowing down on her fair neck.
Edward can also read minds, but he can't read Bella's, part of what marks her as his “own personal brand of heroin.” But because the Cullens' patriarch, a doctor named Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), has taught his brood to snack only on animals and not on humans -- to lessen that whole monster angle -- Edward cautiously courts the tasty new girl.
The will-they-or-won't-they tension that's rather titillating in the book is all but lost on screen, though. The problem isn't Stewart, best known for Into the Wild and a believable, likable Bella who trips in all the right places. (Meyer saddled her with a case of clumsiness that's as unsubtle as Edward's flawlessness.) Not even Pattinson's to blame -- rather, it's that Hardwicke's interpretation of Edward and his fellow vampires is as ludicrous as Meyer's vision was unachievable.
Try not to laugh when you first see Dr. Cullen at the hospital, treating Bella after an accident: Even among pale Washingtonians, Facinelli's Carlisle looks like an albino mime, as alien as someone with a lab coat and clipboard could look and still resemble a human. And Pattinson's mood-swinging but “musical” reticence too often sounds like a 12-year-old attempting to deepen his voice, with grunts instead of sultry “hello”s resulting. Pattinson tries really, really hard to be really, really ridiculously good-looking, but with crazy hair, pancake'd skin, and almost-tough-guy attitude, he just looks ridiculous.
It doesn't help that, with the exception of some rogue bloodsuckers and a game of -- I swear -- vampire baseball, Twilight's main action is yearning. Meyer liked her characters to convey their thoughts with expressions almost more often than words; therefore, Pattinson and Stewart do a whole lot of staring. And because Edward's supposed to be a good guy, he shows off his speed instead of his violent side.
The leads have a couple of juicy moments together, and a mini damsel-in-distress arc is thrown in to keep the story from being completely, well, bloodless. When Edward warns Bella that he's a killer, she responds, “I don't believe you!” Neither do we.
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Linked From: November 24th, 2008Alert Hot News » Twilight tops the US box office charts
1:27 pm[...] Review: “Twilight” By Washington City Paper ,November 24, 2008 And — most crucial — if the franchise’s inaugural big-screen adaptation by director Catherine Hardwicke didn’t suck more than its vampires actually do. … [...]
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Linked From: December 3rd, 2008Twilight « (Mis)readings
11:50 am[...] fans so unlike Dada I’d rather keep my opinions to myself. Instead, allow me to quote from a review by Tricia Olszewski: An actor faces a lot of pressure when tapped to embody a beloved fictional [...]
11:27 am
Best movie of the year.
11:55 am
I laughed the whole way through. The Tween Legion nearly killed me during the credits.
12:19 pm
A tedious review of a tedious film accompanied by two tedious comments and one good one.
1:12 pm
Bella & Edward's first meeting in the bio lab: OSCAR CLIP. Ahem. I will now respectfully retire my Twilight commentary to a network of fansites.
2:59 pm
Amanda, would you include her slow-mo, hair-blown entrance in that Oscar clip?
Glad you liked the movie; I'll stick with the books, which I have to admit I'm enjoying way more than I probably should.
3:36 pm
Yes.
7:22 pm
It was a very poor portrayal of the books enchanting storyline.
7:38 pm
I'm reading a lot of conflicting reviews on this one, guess I'll have to check it out myself.
Logan Lamech
http://www.eloquentbooks.com/LingeringPoets.html
9:05 pm
The twilight movie sucked. They had no romance and was a total disgrace to the book and Stephenie Meyer.
9:03 am
i understand if the movie sucked but it just annoys me how people are unnecessarily harsh to hardwicke and meyer, just because you didn't like it don't mean you should sledge those who did actually entertain and inspire many people, if you don't like it, dont complain, just go find something you do like and invest your time and energy into that instead of making incosiderate comments about how much the movie sucked. Complaining won't make you like it anymore you know
9:41 pm
Is it any wonder this movie is God-awful? The source material is just as horrendous. A vampire guy who so perfecty specialy wecial! And he GLITTERS in the sun! ... gag me to death.
Bram Stoker is good literature. Stephanie Meyer is childishly awful. Need I reiterate the tripe that was the 4th novel? The "birth" scene? The werewolf falling in love with a newborn baby? Garbage. Absolute garbage.
10:22 am
Dude ... how did you get to the fourth book?
12:36 pm
Looking rather fetching today, Amanda.
Look, it became next to impossible to fish “something you do like” out of the sea of trash such as this. Besides, I shall never understand what others see in the initial Stoker’s book - a vilely written, dreary period piece and the best of them all - in the first place. Perhaps it is possible to produce something worthy out of all this vampire drivel after all but that would take an entirely different caliber of a filmmaker. Few of them have bothered so far though. And why should they with the material as weak and uninteresting as this?
6:40 pm
Gosh, the movie was FILLED with dead space, and dead lines and dead air. It was awful and awkward and also hilarious.
I feel as if it could've been better, but I can't imagine how.
Anyways, I don't understand how the movie could've possibly brought any depth to it seeing as the book is lacking. It pains me to read it.
7:01 pm
Just like to toss out that besides the awkward acting, the sweeping cinematography and the musical score weren't sitting too well with me. Why the sweeping arcs of the camera at such random times? It was a bit annoying to watch. The first half of the movie wasn't so bad, it just seemed to get worse as time went on and the vampire thing became all glitter, happiness, and baseball.
2:36 pm
I found that the book, as always, is better than the movie. Aside from the the bad acting, horrible make-up, and a strange cast pick, people still swarm to see it.The movie is marked as exceptional just because of the mandatory parts made on the big screen from the book. If not for these poorly acted out scenes, the movie would be nothing. Still, the movie infers that everyone watching it has read the book. Those who haven't just sit there wondering what the big deal is.
11:46 am
its okay to complain. i paid for the movie ticket, you know. i hate the lines, the heroin-thing and other cheesy-stuffs. i laughed hard when i saw that dr collins scene at the hospital. and glittering vampire. okay, try to be objective, is this magic realism? NO! it was absurd. what the hell... and to think of it, it took an hour BEFORE you can understand what the hell is this movie about. and when a moviegoer is already LOOKING AT HIS WATCH a couple of times that is already a bad sign for this movie.
on the other hand, some even do advanced online booking just to watch this. so I guess, there's really a following. I bet the group of teens sitting next to us already wanted to "gut" me out when I commented that this should be retitled us: Twilight in Cheese Flavor.
But this is not an excuse. Not all people in this world are Twilight-readers. I also don't agree that the director and screenplay writer are blame-proof. Its there name up there in the credits you know. It doesn't say their, DIRECTED BY, ON BEHALF OF. I just don't buy it. They accepted this project hence they should accountable for it...
And the director, screenwriter, the novelist and all those people involved in Twilight should know that the only thing this movie has any relation to a vampire is that IT SUCKS!
1:39 pm
I'll send in night watch to clean it up then.
3:40 pm
I hadn't read the book, and I knew exactly what was going on. Get real, haters.
12:27 am
A sucky movie made from a sucky book. There's not much that could be done with it, which is a pity, given the original idea was kind of okay. smeyer just destroyed her own creation with her idiocy.
10:50 pm
I read the 1st book, and saw the movie. both at the request of a woman I know.
The book is badly written nonsense and the film, well I felt embarrassed to be in the cinema.
Both are about the intellectual equivalent of the WWF, but without it's ability to laugh at itself.
The idea of this pale faced paragon, with his pseudo Byronic posturing with all of the mystique of the vampire myth but none of the danger... It's just too awful, I hope people stay away from this thing in droves.
9:52 am
Jim, I feel for you, man. The only reason I read this book and watched the movie was because my girlfriend asked me to. I'm a fan of good literature and I like to write when I get the time. And let me tell you, it took me a month to read the first book. Why? because it was so god-awful that I kept falling asleep after reading only a page or two. The writing is so, to borrow a word from Bill Cosby, teenagery. I would compare it to some of Stephen King's worst (most juvenile) work minus the crudeness and the decent plotlines. I'm a male in my late 30s and I kept thinking that I felt almost like a pedophile reading it-- like I shouldn't be reading it because it sounds like a 13 year old girl's diary.
I too think that if i hadn't read the book, the movie would have made little sense. Luckily, the few other people in the theater were middle-aged adults, and just about every scene was met with raucous laughter from one side of the theater or the other. It made me feel better! But my gf was enraptured. What the heck.
8:06 pm
Wow there is a lot people that most be bother if they have time to write mean comments bout a movie.... I thought it was a good movie for a tight budget.... let me see u guys make a freaking movie wit a few millions... u gonna remember they gonna pay for the place where its taking place.... and actor or actress to play the parts and film etc.....
7:06 am
Brilliant review.
You said all the right things, mentioned the appropriate moments with just enough quirk.
Great job!
6:12 pm
twilight turned out being more enjoyable to watch than i would have expected; it's a new take on the vampire phenomenon
1:43 am
Even with a higher budget, they would not be able to make a horrid novel into a fair movie.
7:17 pm
Shittiest movie of the year. Period. ;)