The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part I is going to come out in theaters pretty soon, so I thought I would do what I did for Transformers: Dark of the Moon; give a sort of a retrospective of the series so far, leading up to a “recommendation” for the new movie. Look for the recommendation about a week or so before the movie is released.
Twilight is a phenomenon that I will never fully understand. I know, I am nowhere near the target audience for the books, which would be preteen and high school girls. However, even if I were to put myself inside the shoes of one of these girls, I still think that I would’ve lost track of the original Twilight novel within the plethora of similar paperbacks aimed at teenagers. Every fan of the book that I know has said that Stephenie Meyer’s writing isn’t that interesting or unique. I can’t say for myself, because I have absolutely no desire to read any of her books. But you know what? I’m actually glad that the movies based on the books are getting made. That way, I can avoid reading the novels and still gain some insight into this vampire craze so I can judge it for myself. I’m not coming with any preconceptions of the films (as horrid as they may be). I’m trying to keep an open mind of it all.
So here’s the first installment of both the film series and the book series. And since it’s the first installment, we can see the biggest problem with this movie already. The first Twilight movie is sort of an introduction to the characters and the setting. As such, much of the film’s running time is devoted to introducing the many characters and the atmosphere for the rest of the series. And the end result: NOTHING. Literally nothing interesting happens during most of this movie! There is a pretty intense action sequence at around 30 minutes towards the end, but by then, it’s just too little too late.
You would think, with the hour and a half they had to spare, that they would have plenty of time to develop the characters. However, I do not feel like I know any of the characters, or even their names. Instead of meaningful dialogue that would allow the viewer to get to know this wide cast of characters, there is endless small talk that ultimately leads nowhere. This is especially evident in the restaurant scenes, in which Bella and her father talk about what they ordered and who they talked to earlier that day and so on and so forth. And you will really enjoy helping Bella and Edward out with their biology homework as they name off the phases of mitosis! Sure glad this time wasn’t used to talk about the Cullen family or about Edward’s past or about Bella or about ANYTHING!
And not only is the dialogue boring, but it SOUNDS boring too. I had to rewatch certain key scenes of this movie because the actors’ voices were so drab and uninterested, I couldn’t pay attention to them the first time around. I know we are dealing with a bunch of angst-ridden, brooding, Daria-esque teens here, but there has to be SOME energy given in order for me to care about the plot. The boring-sounding dialogue, combined with the morose, blue-tinted environment of this story, just drags the whole movie down, and a film about baseball-playing vampires shouldn’t drag like this.
Now let’s talk about the “heart and soul” of the Twilight series: the epic romance between Bella and Edward. I have a feeling that I will get more into this when I review New Moon, so I’ll try to be brief here. In Twilight, we get to see the beginnings of this timeless, inspirational love that has swooned teenage girls the world over. And, I’m sorry, but I just don’t see the connection here. Bella and Edward, or I should probably say their “actors”, just feel awkward around each other. I’m sure that their relationship was much better established in the book, but on the screen, I never felt like they shared anything. There are scenes that “assume” that they are talking to each other, but the director doesn’t think that it is important to make this explicit, like the film audience doesn’t need to see this romantic development. And the dialogue that they do share sounds like they came straight from an insecure love poem written by a needy emo kid (“You’re like my own personal brand of heroin”, “I’d rather die than stay away from you”, “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb”, etc.). It just sounds like an awkward high school fling to me, not a “love of a lifetime” that this movie tries to sell us.
And while we’re at it, doesn’t it strike anybody as odd that this 108-year-old vampire is stalking and making out with a 17-year-old girl? She turns 18 in the next movie, so I guess it’s fine then, but in this movie she is still under the age of consent. What, is it okay because he looks like he is roughly the same age? I would like to see how that defense holds up in a real-life statutory rape trial.
There is also kind of an unevenness as to the amount of information we know about the two main characters. We get to follow Edward around quite a bit. We meet his whole family, we see his home and his room, we get to find out some of his history, and we even play a game of baseball with him and his family. For as much we are introduced to Edward, we hardly know anything about Bella. We know that her parents are divorced and she once took ballet lessons, and that’s pretty much it. We don’t really see any reason for her cynicism and angst other than the fact that being a child with divorced parents sucks. To me, Bella is like a blank slate, a featureless avatar that the teenage reader can “become” and replace. This story, after all, is essentially a romantic fantasy that the reader can escape into. Maybe in the book, this sort of protagonist works out fine for the story, but it doesn’t make Bella look good on the big screen.
And Edward, oh my God! Even if you forget the fact that he is 91 years older than Bella, Edward still comes across as extremely creepy in this movie. He frequently watches Bella in her sleep, even long before they started going out, and he also watches her often when she is off on her own. He even tells her that the main reason he is attracted to her is because he thinks that her blood smells so sweet. And yet, he tells Bella in a scene that it is HER who should keep herself away from him. Wow.
So far, I have mainly complained about this movie, but I don’t really hate it as much as you might think. Before I began to play this movie, I thought I would absolutely detest it, but I ended up thinking that it wasn’t that bad. Some of the photography was pretty cool, the concept was intriguing, the style was occasionally very inspired, the ONE action scene shown was pretty riveting, and I really liked the whole Cullen family, even though they weren’t featured all that much. I thought that somewhere in this film, there was potential for it to become great. However, with the absolutely depressing environment, the horrible special effects, the cheesy sophomoric dialogue and the lack of character development, the bad immensely outweighs the good.
And on that note, I cannot in all honesty recommend this film, even to fans of the book series. The movie tried so hard to match the gothic poeticism of the novel that it was almost bounded by it. Had there not been as much pressure to remain faithful to the source material, we could’ve seen an adaptation as bold and adventurous as, say, The Shining. Instead, we are left with an inferior, uninspired teenage flick that fails to impress even the most diehard Stephenie Meyer fans. Oh well, here’s to hoping that New Moon will be better.
Rating: 2 Stars
Distributed by Summit Entertainment
Running time: 121 minutes
