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Lovers of Twilight might be disappointed
AP Photo
Kristen Stewart plays Bella Swan and Robert Pattison is Edward Cullen in the movie version of Stephenie Meyer's vampire novel.
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Twilight • Stars: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Billy Burke, Nikki Reed, Peter Facinelli, Michael Welch. • Director: Catherine Hardwicke. • Rating: PG-13 • Running time: 121 minutes. • Showing: Grand 18, Wynnsong 12, Carmike 10, Kernersville Countryside, Starmount, Creekside. • Reviewer's opinion: A terrible script, some miscasting and unconvincing special effects drains the film of all the wit and imagination that made the novel so enjoyable. |
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(out of four)Published: November 20, 2008
Teenage girls will surely squeal with delight throughout Twilight, the feverishly awaited adaptation of the hugely selling vampire novel by Stephenie Meyer.
Just the very sight of the title inspired piercing screeches of glee at a recent screening. And the arrival of our tormented monster-hero, Edward Cullen, is certain to send another wave of shivers.
Director Catherine Hardwicke was also clearly taken by the character, and by the actor playing him -- Robert Pattinson. She shoots him as if he were the featured model in an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, adoringly highlighting his angular cheekbones, his amber eyes (with the help of color contacts), those pouty red lips and that lanky frame.
He might be too pretty, and perhaps that's a crucial key to the character's popularity among girls and young women. He's a nonthreatening, almost asexual vampire. This is not Bela Lugosi, and it's certainly not George Hamilton.
But much of what made the relationship between Edward and the smitten Bella Swan work in Meyer's breezy book has been stripped away on screen, and all that's left is a slog of adolescent angst.
Purists, the ones wearing Forks High School sweat shirts to the multiplex, will be happy to see that the first line of Meyer's book -- "I'd never given much thought to how I would die" -- is also the first line in Melissa Rosenberg's script. Several other choice bits of dialogue have been plucked, and except for a couple of details that were moved around here and there, Twilight the film remains mostly true to Twilight the international literary sensation. (And the author herself makes a quick cameo.)
If you are coming into this material cold, though, you will be seriously baffled as to what the fuss is all about, and that becomes glaringly obvious in the way Hardwicke has staged her action sequences. When Edward leaps from one spot to another to show off his physical prowess, or when he races through the forest with Bella strapped to his back, it looks distractingly jumpy and false.
There is nothing transporting about the visuals. Twilight was a famously low-budget production compared to most traditional blockbusters, but this is ridiculous.
It doesn't help that, as Bella, Kristen Stewart looks singularly sullen the entire time. She is supposed to be enraptured by the thrills of her first love.
Bella's story, for the uninitiated: The quiet, awkward girl moves from Phoenix to rainy Forks, Wash., to live with her police-chief dad (Billy Burke in a bad cop mustache) and quickly finds herself entranced by her mysterious, ethereal classmate Edward.
Nikki Reed, the star and co-writer of Hardwicke's startling debut Thirteen, gets little to do but scowl as Edward's disapproving sister.
But Michael Welch and Justin Chon liven things up as a couple of classmates competing for Bella's attention.
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