B-Movie Review: Twilight

Being as how the Twilight series was a massive cultural phenomenon, I figured it was about time I sat down and watched this film.  What I discovered was that I probably should not have sat down and watched this film.  Seriously though, when something is this popular, it pays to understand why.  Of course the love story is the main reason.  Well, that and the whole vampires being sexy cultural thing.  But what is left over if you were to take away those two essential things?  A pile of crap that someone called a script from a series of books that even I, a staunch opponent of censorship, think should have been burned en masse.

So if you haven’t seen or heard of Twilight, here is the basic premise.  There’s a girl named Bella that moves from the big city to a small town in Washington.  She’s a typical angsty, emo teen that, despite being socially inept, manages to charm the school because she’s cute (or maybe it’s because they have nothing better to do).  But Bella has her eyes locked on the weird kid at school, Edward.  He and his family also happen to be vampires.

So they have a strange courting ritual, whereby Edward treats Bella like crap and she in turn plays the naïve, submissive and self-deprecating girl that worships him.  After a while he gets nicer, but only after he’s thoroughly cowed the little emo girl.  As this weird relationship unfolds, Bella sees Edward do things that normal humans can’t.  Eventually he reveals that he is a vampire.  She goes to meet his vampire family.

Meanwhile, some other vampires are in town and killing people.  But the Cullens (Edward’s family) don’t kill humans, so there’s an issue there.  This problem gets worse when one vampire decides he really wants to kill Bella.  Everyone bands together to help her and the “good” guys win.  The movie then proceeds to wander for fifteen minutes while it decides what to do with the ending.

While the script for Twilight is certainly bare bones when it comes to creative thought, that’s not its biggest weakness.  Many really bad scripts have been made into half-way decent movies, so you kind of have to ignore that fact in favor or more prominent issues.  Like the acting, for example.

Watching Bella and Edward interact is like pulling teeth.  They have these long, drawn-out conversations, complete with poor dialogue that consists of a mix of exposition and small talk.  It’s like watching two people compare shopping lists.  Not to mention that they both talk sooooo sloooooowly, which even further draws out this useless interaction.  Add to this some consistent deadpan stares as their primary form of facial expression, only broken up by some open mouth breathing and rapid blinking, and you have romantic exchanges that sound like cold reads.  Seriously, these two make Keanu Reeves look like Ian McKellen.

While the acting was enough to cause pain, the directing did nothing to alleviate that pain.  This is some of the wackiest editing and camerawork I’ve ever seen and if I didn’t know better I would guess that the director wasn’t even on set for at least half of the filming.  “Hey, little Johnny!  You want to be a director?  Go over there and film this love scene between Bella and Edward.  No, only one take please.  We don’t edit around here.”

What blows me away is that the rating at Rotten Tomatoes put the critics’ score at 49%, which seems abnormally high, and the fans’ score at 74%, which I guess makes sense given the popularity of this piece of garbage.

My final judgment - Avoid like the plague!

Photo Credits -           

Bella and Edward courtesy of empireonline.com