I never read the “Twilight” books by Stephanie Meyers. For all I know, they might be good enough to appease the burgeoning sexual desires of a pubescent girl, but the film version by Catherine Hardwicke (of “Thirteen” and “Lords of Dogtown” fame) is anything but. Instead of an “erotic delight” as promised by a “Twilight” movie poster outside the cinema, I spent most of my time stifling my “delight” (laughter) with my coat, sniggering as painfully awkward lines were thrown around and the film effects attempting to showcase a vampire’s speed looked like the cursor trail I had on my Windows 95 computer. Teen cult sensation film? Yeah, right.
The synopsis of the movie is so dreadfully simple it should deter any individual with a real-brain on their shoulders from watching it (my excuse was that I wanted to see how horrendous this production can be). A seventeen year old Bella Swan (Kristin Stewart) moves to Forks, a town in the middle of nowhere, where the sun don’t shine and the rain don’t stop, to live with her father (Billy Burke). She encounters Edward (prep yourselves for the clichéd character construction), who is problematic and something of a mysterious James Dean, and also (wait for it… wait for it…) a vampire! Against all odds, they fall in love (or lust?), him because of the irresistibility of her blood and her because she is just plain-old daft. They come together only to be faced with a milieu of problems brought upon by their differences. Oh, the drama!
Obviously, “Twilight” is no episode of “Gossip Girl” when it comes to the theme of teenage sexual attraction. Yet, in comparison to the suave Chuck Bass, who is a mere 17 year old mortal with the innate power to make women bend in his favor, the indestructible Edward the Vampire (Robert Pattinson) is as bland and repulsive as the weird kid who sat behind you in 10th grade Biology and mouth-breathed salaciously whenever the word “reproduction” was mentioned. You would think that a 100 year-old, “teenage” vampire endowed with the powers of strength and hypnosis and glistened like diamonds in the sunlight would be interesting enough as a character. In this movie, not really.
Was it the script? All the lines in the film were corny regurgitations attempting to capture real passion as found in “Romeo and Juliet” or “Gone with the Wind”. But when lines like “and so the lion falls in love with a lamb” and “you are like my own personal brand of heroin” are being served, the saccharine nature of this, oh-so-romantic! film has the ability of turning even Takeru Kobayashi bulimic. Its cloyingly romantic ingredients surprisingly enough does nothing to inspire anything physical, and by the end of the movie, its extremely PG-nature (Bella and the Vampire kissed a grand total of three times), had a few members of the audience in the cinema I was in shouting “JUST GET IT ON ALREADY”.
The acting too, is a disappointing, below par performance for such a big production, and I think the casting should have raised more eyebrows than it did. I remember seeing Kristin Stewart alongside Jodie Foster in “Panic Room” and was under the impression that she was a boy until Foster started screaming that she needed to medicate her daughter. Though Stewart did grow into a decent-looking individual, I am surprised that the production company allowed the weight of this movie to be carried on this girl’s shoulders. She has no physically enamoring quality or charisma about her to warrant such devotion from such a powerful figure.
In spite of that, Stewart did an adequate (but not great) job of portraying a girl yearning for sexual gratification. However, the same thing cannot be said of Robert Pattinson as Edward the Vampire, who was a miscast in every reason possible. Firstly, this guy is not hot. Him as Cedric Diggory before never did convince me. He has a concaved face that looked like he was involved in a childhood freak accident where a horse trampled on his face. Twice. And instead of leaping with excitement every time he came onscreen (an onscreen presence Orlando Bloom has in Lord of the Rings), my heart felt like it was on heavy horse tranquilizers. Secondly, his acting was utterly despicable and unconvincing, as he delivered his lines with no enthusiasm and a wide-eyed look that made him seem like he was constantly on crack. If you were Cory Kennedy you would totally dig him, but I think he is a complete weirdo.
The effects too were appalling. Dream sequences where Bella imagines the Vampire sucking her blood and the passage of time depicting the very, VERY innocent escapades of Bella and the Vampire, where all they did was sit around and talk (how erotic), were very amateur. Throughout the entire production, I felt like I was watching a B-grade film I could easily have seen while surfing TV stations.
I am overwhelmingly disappointed that the director, who chilled me to the bone with her award-winning “Thirteen”, could produce such an awful movie that lacked soul and creativity. This film, in one single stroke, has managed to make the perennially seductive vampire unsexy.
Wait, and what is this I heard that they are making a sequel? A WHOLE SERIES???
Goddamnit.
