Twilight

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson do the hokey without the pokey in Twilight.

As Printed in The Lumberjack on Nov. 26

by Gary Sundt

Warning: If you are a Twilight fan, you’ll probably be pissed off. But if you like good movies, you’ll understand what I am talking about.

Twilight is a book by Stephanie Meyer about a normal high school girl that falls in love with an abnormal high school vampire. I bet you knew that. By the time this review is being read, you have probably already seen this flick, and the ineffectual musings of neither me nor anybody else is going to stop you if you intend to and haven’t. But I still think it’s a decision to rethink, because director Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Twilight isn’t very good.

The movie opens with Bella (Kristen Stewart) moving from Arizona to Washington to live with her police chief dad (Billy Burke) while mom and step dad go and travel around the country or something. Of course Bella is the new girl at school, but the local kids are more than welcoming (the first of many suspensions of disbelief Twilight asks for) and she ends up fitting right in.

Bella soon develops a crush on the weird local boy with odd eyebrows and a knack for talking kind of silly. His name is Edward (Robert Pattinson). She looks over at him. He penetrates her with his eyes. You want any more than that, you should probably watch a different vampire movie.

So, Ed acts weird, and Bella is interested. Then the boy shows off his super strength and speed while saving the girl from certain car-inflicted death. Now Bella is way interested. Then she figures out he’s a vampire. Edward says they should be very far away from one another because he might get peckish. Bella says f-that. So now they are in love, and Bella is going to be in constant peril from here on out. Sweet.

Let’s focus on the couple’s lack of sex in this movie. Most teenagers want to get laid, and if they don’t, they definitely want to make out. But Edward and Bella can’t do anything because Eddy might lose control and eat her. He’s gotta keep his fangs (dick) in his mouth (pants). Not sweet.

I smell an abstinence parable, but Twilight doesn’t handle it in any believable way. Their sheer lack of physical chemistry brings into question the very mechanics their relationship is based on. It’s pretty much awkward conversation and equally awkward glances. The camera does a bizarre thing of tilting up into the sky when Bella and Edward are about to kiss and don’t. It does this because there is nothing else for it to do. It can’t very well stay on these two kids while they don’t indulge their hormones, because what follows is not the love story that Twilight strives to be. Realistically, there would be an awkward pause, followed by one of them saying something like, “So you want to go play racquetball or something?”

But perhaps it’s simply a case of Bella being in love with the handsome, brooding bad boy. And maybe Edward’s awkwardness is endearing to her or something. And maybe, just maybe living forever and drinking blood sounds awesome to Bella. This would make her attraction to Ed and want for immortality to have some validity. But you know how they say you shouldn’t get a tattoo with your high school sweetheart’s name on it? Well, the same should be said for getting all-immortal with them.

The trouble here might be that the source material was meant for 12-year-old girls, and just doesn’t really hack it as movie. Perhaps screenwriter Melissa Rosenburg did the best she could with what she had. But in the words of screenwriter Richard Price (The Color of Money, Ransom): “A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Everything else – just tear that motherf-er apart.”

Unfortunately, Twilight is as Meyer’s source material dictates. What doesn’t help is Hardwicke’s decision to handle the film with a side of cheese, causing everything to ring ridiculous, from the visual effects to the emo film score to the story itself. If I were flipping through channels and Twilight was on the Sci-Fi channel, the only thing I would have noticed was, “Hey… isn’t that the chick from Into the Wild and that dude from Harry Potter 4?”