[This was originally a class assignment, hence the quotations.]
Over the previous Summer I found myself increasingly perplexed by a media phenomenon that seemed to ever so obnoxiously sweep the globe. Apparently, a popular teenage book series, which I’d never heard of, was being made into a film to be released in the Fall. The aforementioned film, Twilight, concerned the escapades of a teenage vampire and his love for a teenage non-vampire with (like totally OMG!) horrendous consequences (despite the implied, yet subtle notions of bestiality). Immediately, my crappy-cash-cow-movie-aimed-at-teenage-girls sense went off upon having to endure the swooning of every girl in the audience during the film’s trailer attached to, quite audaciously, The Dark Knight. The 2-minute preview that featured the likes of gloomy Harry Potter-esque forested landscapes and Hollister models pretending to be vampires had me all but ensured that it would be no more than a Nickelodeon movie disguised as something bigger, and I quickly organized a propaganda-filled campaign of hatred towards it. I began a personal boycott of the film, cursing it as the epitome of the spoiled tween white girl persona, that it would only be enjoyed by those who wear the word “pink” on the back of their sweatpants and drive around in silver Jettas, and that any money it made would be solely derived from that demographic. When the reviews were posted after the movie was released, I was overjoyed to see that many critics agreed with me, like Frank Ochieng, a featured critic of MovieEye.com:
"Twilight sparkles for its intended audience of indiscriminate adolescent females. However, it will only be deemed as a softened, hackneyed horror show of synthetic affection for the rest of us."
For months, I avoided exposing myself to Twilight; I avoided conforming like everyone else in the world and buying a ticket and supporting the very reason terrorists hate us. I went dateless for a few weeks while it was still in mainstream theaters, knowing that every girl I made one with would inevitably want to sit in the theater and tremble in the presence of “pin-up prince” (Ochieng) Robert Pattinson, who plays the leading vampire, and make me feel like the world’s ugliest college kid (even though Pattinson’s lipstick appears thicker than his female co-star’s most of the time). Alas, when the feature came to our local theater in recent days, I was finally coerced by some of those ravaging hormonal females into seeing it. I paid my dollar, ripped up a few Man-Cards, and stepped into the theater guns ablaze, prepared to metaphorically rip Twilight to shreds and burn its teen-corrupting corpse.
I rolled my eyes the first time our male heroic vampire, Edward Cullen, appeared on screen, predictably accompanied by the slow motion and slanted eye contact. A few minutes later, he locks eyes with the female non-vampire love interest, Bella, played by Kristen Stewart (aka the most boring girl in the world, ever), and I once again, though hesitantly, rolled my eyes. Then something completely unexpected happened. A scene or two later, Edward saves Bella Spider-Man-style by jumping in the path of a runaway van and stopping it just before it gets the chance to crush her puny little human body into oblivion followed by a longing stare into each other’s gaze. And, much to my utter surprise, I couldn’t come to visually criticize it; I couldn’t roll my eyes or chuckle mildly. Why? Because as much as I wanted to hate Twilight, as much as I would love to tell you how dreadfully awful and clichéd it is, I can’t. I can’t because, to my horror, the blue tinting, the somewhat serious romance and the awkward mystery of the main characters was all, well, it was all working.
Alright, I’ll admit it: Twilight is good. And no, I don’t mean good as in “tolerable”, I mean good as in that I genuinely enjoyed the experience. What the film does so well is something the marketing for it didn’t do so well: it doesn’t overdo anything.
Balance is important in filmmaking; spending too much time focusing on one aspect of your story to the point where it becomes monotonous bores your audience, but not spending enough time on it has the opposite effect, where plot points are lost. Twilight provides everything in small doses. The action, the drama, the suspense, and yes, even very good humor on occasion, is all delivered at a good pace throughout the course of the film without wasting too much time on either one. Yes, it has your occasional moments that appease only teenage girls, like Edward’s dramatic entrance, but they’re rare, and everything else in regards to the relationship between he and Bella is surprisingly mature. Like I said, nothing is overdone; the vampires are held in a more realistic light, but the movie doesn’t focus too much on it. It tells us what they are and leaves it at that, without incorporating magic or long rants about legends that interrupt the suspension of disbelief. It is, as one Washington Post reviewer put it, a “self-respecting vampire movie” (O’Sullivan). That may be the best way to describe Twilight; it’s respectful to itself and its audience and its actors and never goes down the road of horror, portraying the bloodsuckers in a more humanistic manner.
A movie is empty without its performances. Nothing does a better job at immersing you into the world the film attempts to create than good acting, and the title characters have some of the best on-screen chemistry I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s because they’re both fairly creepy looking or both dry and weird, but the romance between Bella and Edward is, dare I say, believable. Having two actors stare at each other for prolonged periods of time is a common method used by directors to convey the essence of love, and it’s dangerous if the actors don’t have that special connection. Luckily, it works gloriously here as the feelings our two stars have for each other in the film come across as completely genuine.
Twilight is far from perfect, mind you. O’Sullivan mentions in his Post review that “the special effects seem outdated, as director Catherine Hardwicke relies too much on motion blur”. There’s an essentially useless character named Jacob who shows up once in awhile to steal screen time, but we never really learn anything about him, nor do we ever really care. The third act really falls apart, and feels as if it was put together at the last second. The story’s primary antagonist is both introduced and disposed of in under a half hour, and what feels like what should be the longest, most heart-wrenching section of the movie ends up being cut disappointingly short with no real sense of danger. It’s almost as if Michael Bay snuck onto the set and kicked Hardwicke off the director’s chair for the final leg of the film (I couldn’t resist), and because of that it speeds up as if to catch a deadline when the reality is that it needed maybe an extra 20 minutes or so of breathing room to come to a satisfying conclusion. It breaks what I dub the “Jumper Rule”, whereas the ending exists only as a precursor to an inevitable sequel.
None of these quibbles really ruin the experience the film has to offer. In fact, Twilight is one of the biggest surprises to reach movie theaters in a long, long time. It feels as if the filmmakers went against the grain of appealing only to teenage girls and made a dark, well-written, mature romance film with impeccable performances that does an outstanding job of never taking itself too seriously while at the same time never becoming a virtual parody. I applaud it, as well as all the people who ridiculed me for doubting it. It’s one of the rare films that seeks to outdo the expectations set before it, positive and negative, and succeeds grandly in both.
Twilight
running time: 2 hours
score: 3 out of 4
I hear an expression sometimes when I ask people if they liked a particularly movie: “It’s good…if you’re into that sort of thing.” I can’t think of any better way to describe this film than that phrase. Watchmen is a movie for people who like Watchmen the graphic novel. Just like U2-3D is a movie for people who love U2 and The Fast and the Furious is for white kids who want to be black. I have no doubt that it remains faithful to its source material considering it runs longer than it takes to actually read most books these days; I don’t see how they could’ve left anything of significance out. It feels like it goes on forever, with the stories all winding down to a single 40-minute climax that would’ve been better suited for a mini-series on the SciFi channel.
