Twilight: My Review of the Movie

So I just got back from watching Twilight. Like so many of you, I read the books and fell in love with Edward and anxiously awaited for the movie to hit the big screen. I see maybe one movie a year on the big screen and this was the one I was going to pay the $12.00 that it costs to go to the movies now a days.

I painfully sat through 30 minutes of commercials and previews, where the only interesting thing they showed was that the LOST premiere starts on January 21st, Wednesday and is three hours long. WOO WOO! Huge LOST fan right here. C-A-N-N-O-T W-A-I-T.

Then the lights dimmed, and the tension grew high in the theatre, as we all awaited the moments that Bella and Edward were to meet. Around me sat 50 teenage couples, a painful reminder that I was well out of my age group and reading a book designed for lovesick kids. Ah, such is life. I still find 18 19 20 year old boys hot, what do you want from me….

Here is where you all hate me. I thought the movie was a shame. I fell in love with the books, reading through all four in under 3 weeks. One after another, I spent $20 to purchase these books in a row, killing my entire book budget for three months in under a month, just to find out what happens next, but I didn’t fall so hard for the movie.

In the book, Bellas character is definitely clumsy, but at no time do I take her as stupid. She is, after all, the only person in Forks that has figured out the Cullens are vampires. But the movie paints her too much as a bumbling, trip over your words, little girl. By the end of the movie, I was all but cringing on the hospital scene where she sputtered through her argument with Edward. It didnt feel like she didnt want to lose him or live her life without him, it felt like bad acting.

And yes, the movie is about Vampires, so there is going to be an element of cheesefest in the fact that they can run fast or are super strong, but the animation of Edward running through the forest with Bella on his super fast legs, was so amateurishly done, that I am sure the Superman and Spiderman directors will be lending some advice over to this movies producers. I know that what Edward was doing was impossible, but I don’t want to feel that when I watch. I want to believe.

But the worst part of the entire movie for me, was how badly I wanted to love Robert Pattinson as Edward. I was not sure of him when the previews came out. To be honest, he didn’t scream “Edward” to me. I can say I was sold on him by the close of the movie, but the first 50 minutes of his overly sexy/brooding look through his eyebrows, was so unrealistic and overdone, that even I started scowling. I know the character was partly that way, but there needs to be some sort of chemistry between the two main characters and it was hard looking at him looking through his eyebrows for so long.

The sexy pout look was so contrived and the slow mo when the Cullens entered the cafeteria was unintentionally hysterical. I felt like laughing where I should have been feeling emotion about a scene, and the conflict of the acting versus the reality of what I knew of the book, bothered me.

I also felt a bit left empty by the end of the movie and the plot regarding James. As soon as it started, it was over, and I do believe James brought on more vampire feel then anyone else in the movie. I was disappointed they spent more time working on breaking the walls down with the main characters then developing a plot.

Last, but not least, they could have tried harder on the makeup. When you coat someone in white paint to lighten their skin….(and this goes for women putting on base too) please blend with the neck. At times, the characters would turn and their necks would look like they were hanging in Hawaii and their faces were stark white. I noticed this most with Dr. Cullen. At one point in the movie, they had finally blended Edward enough, including his hands and arms, but his hands got wet during the forest scene and as he walked by, the underside of his hands were “human”, for lack of a better term, but his face was vampire. It was just bad detailing. And never once did I see actual vampire teeth. Even in the last big fight scene where there were close ups of Edward and James’s teeth, I never saw any points and I was looking for them. To have a vampire movie and leave out the teeth, was awkward. For a movie as large and anticipated as this one, I would expect nothing less then perfection on the big screen.

The few things I did like was that Dr. Cullen was surprisingly likable. I thought he followed the character in looks and in acting and could see him continuing on as it further develops. Bellas dad stole a few scenes with his shotgun and pepper spray and was well done as a down home Sheriff. The few times Bella and Edward worked decently together, there was a real connection. I loved the simple scene where she asked him to put on his seat belt and Robert Pattinson broke out in what could only be perceived as a real life giggle and told her to put on hers. I also enjoyed the bit of “google it” quip. He carried some moments that had you sighing and wishing that you were a vampire too. The whole conflicted love and the feel of lust and love only a teenager can bring on in a relationship, was well placed in several parts of the movie, and it made you fall in love with falling in love.

Clearly Robert caught some of the sexiness of Edward that made a good girl so badly want to be bad. And his hair…. meant to have my hands, er, i mean, Bellas hands run through it. I would feel guilty for talking about him as a 17 year old, but in his own words, he has been 17 “for awhile”, so I figured I am safe.

All in all….I would save my $8 and keep the characters sacred….it was not much more then a filler to me to capitalize on a movie while the iron was hot. And I bit.

~Trisha