Twilight (review)
Twilight is a movie for 14 year old girls. I am neither 14, nor a girl. Seeing this movie was not my idea, so please refrain from sending me emails telling me I’m an idiot for seeing this movie and not expecting it to suck. For the record, I, like all men who have seen Twilight, was dragged to see it by my Significant Other. I’m the wrong age and wrong gender to see this movie, and it almost feels wrong to tear apart a movie that wasn’t made for me in the first place. On the other hand, the movie is poorly written, directed, edited, acted, and has no plot, so the hell with it. One thing before we begin, Twilight is aimed at a younger audience, I’ve assumed that the majority of the people who find this review will be under 18, and as such I’ve replaced all foul language in this article with the names of monsters from Universal’s stable of pre-1960’s creature features. It’s the least I could do. You’re welcome.
Twilight is the epic story of friendly vampires who don’t kill people versus friendly werewolves that don’t kill people and also don’t turn into wolves. This story is told through the eyes of a heroine who doesn’t do anything or advance the plot in any way. Actually, there isn’t any plot to speak of, except for a love story that gets wrapped up less than half way through the film. The movie keeps hinting that something interesting might be about happen, but for the most part it it never does. There’s no conflict whatsoever – every once and a while some sort of potential complication turns up that threatens to turn the movie interesting, but the movie constantly finds new and irritating ways to avoid conflict. The entire movie is a series of anticlimaxes, culminating in an actual climax where virtually nothing is at stake (pun not intended). The vampires are all “vegetarian”, meaning they don’t drink human blood (a hilarious pre-credits sequence shows a vampire chasing down and tackling a deer like it was sacking a quarterback in an interspecies game of football), which pretty much removes the one thing that makes them dangerous, romantic, and. . . you know, interesting, in the first place. These vampires are about as imposing as Count Chocula. It also hints that an all out war between vampires and werewolves is about to throw down, a war rooted in local legend and centuries in the making, a war that has the potential to move the plot in some, any direction, but the most we get is a few angry glares and some vague threats that don’t lead to anything. The whole thing feels the prologue to another movie. If the Twilight series was an episode of The X-Files, this movie would be the part that takes place before the opening credits.
The movie’s plot, so to speak, is this: the heroine moves from Arizona to Washington for no particular reason. She falls in love with a vampire. A different vampire comes out of nowhere and tries to kill her, but all the other vampires kill him instead. The end. It’s a passable, if horribly bland sequence of events, but there’s not quite enough conflict to push those sequence of events into becoming an actual plot. For example, the movie opens with our 17-year-old heroine, Bella, moving from her mother’s house in Phoenix, Arizona to her father’s house in Forks, Washington. Bella isn’t terribly happy about this move, but the movie quickly manages to snuff out any potential conflict by having her father, Charlie, be a totally awesome guy who gives Bella a truck as a “welcome home” gift. The truck gets a few giggles as she pulls into school the next day, but Bella hasn’t even made it to the other side of the parking lot before she’s become the front page story of the school’s newspaper (seriously), and has been hit on by no less than three different guys. Everyone loves Bella. By lunch time she already has a posse. This is supposedly based on author Stephanie Meyer’s experiences going to college and suddenly having guys asking her out every weekend. I say this to her as a guy who’s been to college and can speak from experience: college guys will murder the Rue Morgue out of anything. The only way for a woman to not get asked out on a college campus is if she’s actively missing her head, and some drunk guy at a frat party would still briefly consider it. During lunch, Bella catches the eye of the most sought-after guy in school, the guy every other girl in school has tried and failed to woo. Bella gets him in a few days. The guy, Edward Cullen, turns out to be a vampire, but he only eats forest critters and is no real threat. Bella desperately wants Edward to put his Creature in her Black Lagoon, but he refuses, not because he doesn’t want to, but because he’s just such a swell guy. He brings her home to meet his family, although he’s incredibly nervous that his folks might make some sort of faux pas and embarrass him in front of his new girlfriend, like showing his old baby photos, or eating her. They don’t. Also, they’re millionaires. An evil vampire wanders into the movie, quite possibly from a better movie, and starts hunting Bella. Fortunately her boyfriend-of-a-few-weeks’ family has no qualms with risking their lives and uprooting their entire existence to protect her. They drive her all the way back home to Arizona, where it looks like her mother may be in danger, but isn’t. Bella confronts the evil vampire and threatens to become an active character in her own story, but fortunately all the good vampires come sweeping to her rescue before she has the chance to become self-sufficient. The movie ends with another evil vampire deciding to take revenge on Bella in the sequel.
The characters in this movie are astoundingly poorly written, and even more poorly acted, although I doubt even Daniel Day-Lewis could stretch one of these characters into the second dimension. The characters are totally flat, and there’s barely a hint of character progression throughout the entire movie. For example, Bella’s “thing” is that she scowls. Bella always scowls. Her face is in a permanent scowl for the entire movie (I paid a lot of attention to this because there really isn’t much else going on to pay attention to), and she can only ever react to things in various degrees of scowl. Occasionally, something will happen that requires Bella to actually scowl, but since she already is, she’s instead forced to start blinking furiously like she has eyes full of sawdust. This is entire emotional range of the main character. The secondary male characters are somehow even flatter. At one point, Bella’s father’s friend, Billy, and his son, Jacob, come by to watch “the game” on TV. We’re told this via dialogue that hints that no one involved with writing the movie has ever watched a game of anything on TV, or even heard two males talking to each other before. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if their dialogue was lifted directly from beer commercials. Billy and Jacob, by the way, are natives, and live on a reservation just outside of town. They’re also werewolves, although they never sprout hair or really do much of anything at all at any point during the entire movie. Actually, the movie never comes right out and admits that they’re werewolves, but the movie wouldn’t be less subtle about it if Joseph dashed across the street on all fours after a rabbit and swallowed it whole. Billy, by the way, is a paraplegic (although he still drives a truck), which leads to a fascinatingly awkward scene where a paraplegic native werewolf driving a pickup truck drives past a vegetarian vampire driving a station wagon, and the two exchange glares while ominous music plays. This is about as far as the vampires-versus-werewolves thing gets developed. Bella learns Edward is a vampire after reading about the vampire/werewolf thing in a book of local lore, and while she immediately determines that Edward is 100% without a doubt a mythical bloodsucking undead monster, it never occurs to her that the werewolf half of the story might also be true.
Speaking of Edward, he’s probably the most poorly written male in the entire movie, beating out even the beer commercial dads. Edward is the most perfect man alive (so to speak). He’s filthy rich, attractive, and will never look a day older. He sticks around all night just to watch you sleep. When he says he loves you, he means it, he’s not just trying to get in your pants. He’ll carry you up a mountain just to show you the view. Technological limitation are all that’s stopping Edward from stepping out of the screen and brushing the audience’s hair. Edward’s only flaw is that he can’t go out in the sunlight or he’ll sparkle like he’s made of crystal. It gives away that he’s a vampire, but on the other hand this actually makes him even more attractive. Edward’s entire existence is basically to fulfill Bella’s every desire and make her life perfect in every way. It’s Cinderella with vampires. Stephenie Meyer actually found a way to make Cinderella less realistic. Meanwhile the only thing guys have to look forward to is a few good-looking girls (one of Bella’s friends has a particularly impressive set of sweater mummies). Going back to sparkly vampires, the special effects for Edward’s “sparkle” are incredibly bad. He looks less sparkly and more like a poorly compressed animated GIF. Not that he looks any better in the dark – the generic vampire makeup in this movie is abysmal for a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. The vampires simply have white makeup smeared across their faces, occasionally missing in a few spots, giving us pale white vampires with bright pink ears. They’re a black t-shirt with VAMPIRE written across it away from being ironic Halloween costumes.
Rating: 2/5 Glimmering Dreamboats
As some final thoughts, here are a few things that I hope will get addressed in the sequels:
- Owning property requires you to pay property taxes, which means the government has to have all sorts of files on you. Does no one at the IRS find it suspicious that Mr. Cullen hasn’t been late filing his taxes in 187 years?
- Edward keeps repeating High School every three years, and as such the family has to move every three years so Edward can repeat high school again. Shouldn’t he be the smartest kid in school since he’s taken these classes hundreds of times? Alternately, shouldn’t his guidance councilors be putting him in the “special” classes after taking one look at his student records and seeing that he’s been repeating the same grade for years? Why doesn’t Edward just claim to be 18 and go to work, or more realistically, mooch off his millionaire folks?
- How many times has Mr. Cullen (a doctor) had to update his medical degree? Is a medical degree issued in the 1800s still valid?
- If vampires are forced to play baseball in thunderstorms because the hit the ball so hard it sounds like thunder, how come they can’t make it fly past the outfield? Weren’t ballplayers hitting home runs decades before steroids and human growth hormone? Wouldn’t hitting a ball hard enough to create a sonic boom turn the bat into toothpicks? Wouldn’t that be dangerous to someone who’s only weakness is shards of wood, akin to a human batting with a loaded shotgun?
- Do all Native Americans turn into werewolves on full moons, or just some of them? Do they have to close down Native-run casinos every full moon for fear of them turning into slaughterhouses? Why haven’t they made a Dusk Till Dawn sequel about this?
