Rating: D
If you are unaware of the recent tween phenomenon known as Twilight then you either live under a rock or are dead. This movie is made by girls for girls. It was written by a woman (Stephanie Meyer), directed by a woman (Catherine Hardwicke), and starred a young female actress named Kristen Stewart who has also been in good movies like Panic Room. Also, a supposedly attractive young male was put in to serve as a love interest. Before we go any further, I would like to make it clear that after the song “Super Massive Black Hole”, which I used to love, was ruined for me during the baseball scene, I could no longer watch this travesty go on any longer. I turned it off and went to read Dracula to heal my mental wounds.
Just in case you are one of the few who have indeed been living under a rock, this film tells a story about a young girl, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), who moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father after having trouble living in Arizona with her mother. While there she meets Edward (Robert Pattinson), a mysteriously depressed man who never goes to school when the sun is out. In other words, EMO! All of the buzz around the movie makes the character Edward into a vampire. However, that is entirely inaccurate. In fact, Edward even says that he is something similar to a vampire called a “Cold One”. But I’m not here to discuss the fact that these “Cold Ones” are not vampires.
Just because the movie has done amazingly well, does not mean that it is actually a well done movie. Kristen Stewart is a promising talent that will most certainly go on to do better movies in her future. Unfortunately her character in this film is so depressing and typical of a brooding teenage girl that I could not care about her feelings at all. In fact, I found myself yelling at the screen about how stupid she is for playing a baseball game with a bunch of vampire imitators that want to kill her. The judgment of these characters is completely out of whack with the majority of rational human beings. This alone caused me not to care about the characters but rather made me aggravated with them.
Stewart gives a decent performance while every other actor completely sucks. Pattinson was too busy pouting his lips and squinting his eyes to worry about giving some reality to a flat character. Or maybe he did a really good job of interpreting the character that just sucks. I haven’t read the book and I have no intention of reading it because I’m not a twelve year old girl who suffers from guy problems.
The effects weren’t all that great either. During the Spiderman tree climbing scene you might as well have been seeing the wires around Pattinson’s body. He was at arm’s length from the trunk of the tall tree making for a completely ridiculous look for a vampire. Along with terrible looking effects, there was nothing special about the cinematography. It seemed like there was no innovative thought put behind the film. Everything seemed to rely on the attractiveness of the actors even though Pattinson looks like he has Down Syndrome. As previously stated, this was a film made specifically for females. It is simply a redundancy on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet except this version has a moody, sparkling, vampire wannabe.
The only good aspect of the entire film was setting. The landscape was absolutely beautiful, capturing the majesty of the forests of Northwest America. Overall, I have one word of recommendation for people thinking about watching or rewatching this film. Don’t.
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