"I'd never given much thought to how I would die...I would not have imagined it like this," Bella Swan muses. I, personally, never imagined that I would want to die in a dark movie theater watching a dull romance about two teenagers, one brain-dead and one undead. But there I was, staring at the screen and then at my pencil, temptation playing itself out.
Stephanie Meyer's overblown and overrated (called the next Harry Potter and the greatest love story since Pride and Prejudice) Twilight series has been swept off bookstore shelves and into the hearts of teenage girls and their developmentally arrested mothers. Twilight tells the "epic" story of an ordinary adolescent girl, Bella Swan, who falls "irrevocably" and "unconditionally" in love with the "devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful" century-old vampire Edward Cullen. On November 21, 2008 the film adaptation of the first novel, Twilight starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson was brought to the big screen to the delight of young and impressionable girls.
Stewart is well-cast as Bella Swan, possibly the most awkward and self-doubting 17-year-old ever documented in fiction. While Bella’s blandly whiny self-absorption is grating in the series, the transition from book to movie makes her infinitely more likable, as her most puerile thoughts remain contained in her head.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Robert Pattinson, whose range of emotions run from extremely tortured to only mildly tortured. The characters are flat and lack real personalities: Bella is defined by her insecurity, a severe inner ear problem, and an eerie dependence on Edward, The Perfect Boy, whose favorite activities are staring longingly at Bella and sparkling like a supernatural disco ball.
The movie isn’t helped much by the terrible script and inevitably improbable plot. Twilight in a nutshell: “Suffer-in-silence type” Bella is adored immediately upon her self-imposed exile to Forks, despite her lack of interest in any of the other kids in school—she has eyes only for mysterious and beautiful Edward. Edward appears at first to be repulsed by Bella, which attracts her even more. One car crash and several awkward conversations later, Edward confesses that he is in love with both her and the smell of her irresistible blood. Bella decides she’s okay with that: no relationship is perfect.
After Bella and Edward get together, the rest of the film pretty much consists of the two of them gazing chastely at each other in fields, trees, etc. and hanging out with his equally mysterious and beautiful vampire family. Then the evil vampire trio arrives and decides that Bella’s blood would indeed be delicious, not that the audience cares by this point. The film culminates with Edward and Bella dancing together at prom while Bella plots ways to convince him to turn her into a vampire. Because after a month, she knows they’re meant to be together forever.
Highlights: vampire baseball, Edward advising Bella to “hold on tight, spider monkey”, Bella whispering how beautiful he is (to which Edward responds by ripping off his shirt and bellowing that he has the “skin of a killer”), and Bella’s complete and total overreaction when Edward suggests that their relationship might end someday (“WHA-You just can’t say stuff like that to me. EVER.”).
The movie is an improvement over the book, but there are things no director can fix. Twilight can’t decide whether to be a supernatural fantasy or a teenage romance and settles for a clichéd hybrid that substitutes shaky close-ups of the character's faces for an actual plot. The theme of dangerous first love between a human and a vampire has the potential to be a decent story. Unfortunately, Meyer’s tale of teenage obsession over an indestructible and iridescent vampire fails to meet it.
Fans of the series may enjoy. The rest of us will quietly suppress our nausea.
-Acerbec and Riding
The funny thing about you writing how much you hated the movie was that most people loved it. All of my friends couldn't stop talking about it for days. If I am to be honest, I would have to flat out tell you that the movie was better than the book. I've never been a fan of the book...sure, it's a fun read, but there was nothing deep or creative about it. At least the movie had nice photography.
ReplyDeleteBella kind of annoyed me in the movie. She always had the same expression on her face--she constantly looked dazed or looked like she had no idea what was going on. Edward was actually fun to watch because I never knew when he would randomely break into one of his seizures.
Surprisingly, though, I was okay with the movie. I was never expecting the movie to actually be 'amazing' because my friend's mom had already warned me. She had said to me, after seeing it, "Don't go if you're expecting something deep, it's really just a cute teen romance." She was right.