Twilight

If there was a fad in human history that will forever be an embarrassing time for those who were associated with it, it will be the phenomenon that was the Twilight book series. Written in 2005 by author Stephenie Meyer, this singular book about a teen girl falling in love with a vampire took the world (especially the teenage girl demographic) by storm, resulting in several sequel books, a rabid fan-base of those who wanted to dictate who should end up with who (almost to a disturbed level), and eventually its own film franchise retelling the story of all four books, with the one that started it all being released in 2008. After leaving her mother and stepfather to live with her father in the small town of Forks, teenage girl and killer of fun, Bella Swan (played by Kristen Stewart) tries to adjust to her new home and school, but can’t seem to find any joy out of anything despite her life being pretty great (the common showcase of a self-indulging ego-centric brat). However, something does eventually catch her eye, that being the mysterious, aloof and white-as-anything Cullen family, in particular Edward Cullen (played by Robert Pattinson). Even though this boy seems to actively be repulsed by her, Bella (for some reason) shows interest in him, especially after he miraculously saves her from a car accident with seemingly supernatural powers. After confronting him about it, he reveals that he is in fact, a vampire and fitted with all the components of being a vampire including being immortal, heightened senses and abilities, and a thirst for blood (as well as shinning like a pretty, pretty princess). Despite the fact that he blatantly stated how much he wants to devour her, she starts to date him and becomes familiar with his family, most of whom are welcoming but are hesitant of the consequences. Said consequence comes in the form of a nomadic vampire named James (played by Cam Gigandet), who has caught the scent of Bella and now wishes to hunt her down and kill her, leaving Edward to face off with him in order to save his newfound ‘’love’’. Despite the widespread popularity of this franchise (both in book and film form), it fails to address the obvious issue that it is an awful franchise. With confused storytelling, bitter and detestable characters, writing on par with a kindergarten assignment, and a romance so toxic and poorly established that its honestly awful that so many young girls fell for its garbage.

When the initial pitches for the film were being thrown out, one of the original ideas was going to be woefully different to the original source material, including more action-oriented set pieces to hook in the male demographic, Bella being more of a tough, foul mouthed, action star who killed vampires and apparently ‘’rode a jet ski while being chased by the FBI’’, and pretty much capturing nothing of what the original books presented, leading the director Catherine Hardwicke and lead screenwriter, Melissa Rosenberg, to construct a film more akin to the books. While most adaptations can go overboard sometimes and miss the point of its original source by changing too much, it is kind of nice that these two wanted to stick as close to it as faithfully possible while still altering it to work as an actual movie, but the key problem is that the source material is complete trash. You can’t salvage a lot of this material, so in attempting to keep faithful to the book, you get stuck with all the horrible components of said book. The story is incredibly slow-moving and presents a narrative that has so little going for it that its understandable that it needed several books to keep a franchise going as literally barely anything happens in this film. Having a story solely based around romance doesn’t have to be unengaging as showcasing an actual romance (even a teen-based romance) can be handled well with proper execution and writing, and this movie has neither. Even ignoring how painfully dated this film has become with the visual design, the dreary look, the characters outfits and attitudes, the music and the movie’s little quirks and oddities (the film almost ends with a music video), the basis for this story is just plain boring and has very little to hook newcomers into this world of horny vampires and even hornier humans. It doesn’t take advantage of its premise and instead drenches itself in painful teen romance cliches mixed with equally troubling elements to make a movie that doesn’t work as a vampire story or as a romance. The director had made moves in the past that while still receiving mixed reception, had good qualities that showcased her talent like Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown and The Nativity Story, so this isn’t necessarily a problem with talent, rather a failure to save a un-salvageable property. Even with that in mind, the directing still isn’t great with poor pacing, an ugly visual style, wooden acting and little energy to make this film the least bit interesting.

Both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were ironically made famous due to these movies, and much like other actors who started off in poor material, later went on to show that they were actually very talented individuals later in their careers. Both have clearly showcased what they are capable of in more recent times, but there is very little to defend in these films as both are absolutely horrible. In their defense, the writing and directing doesn’t help them in the least, as both characters are not only constructed horribly, but both are just awful, annoying, bland people to be around and you find yourself hating them as you keep watching. In most romances like these, there’s bound to be characters you don’t enjoy and maybe one of those is one of the two leads, but when both are awful to be around, its very hard to work with that. The villain is only introduced in the last 40 mins so there’s no time to set him up and all the side characters are all poorly handled, blandly written and given very little screen time to develop any sense of character, so there’s not even any other faces to latch onto in this film, leaving the audience stuck with these two. Edward is a creep in every sense of the word; his dialogue is awkward and painfully constructed in a way to feel incredibly manipulative, the acting is so wooden and so uncomfortable that it even transcends generic bad and feels so hypnotizing odd that its so numbing to witness, and his actions are so toxic, so creepy and so un-romantic that the only reason girls all over the world fell in love with him is because he looks pretty (his track record consists of glaring at her in class, stalking her to ‘’protect her’’, gas lighting her when she discovers he has powers, saying how he wishes to kill her more than anyone else because her blood is so alluring, and sneaking into her window and watching her sleep without permission). On the flip-side, Bella is equally as awful and unpleasant to be around. This character literally has no positive attitude, no positive traits to latch onto, no joys or wants out of life, no urgency to do things herself, no want to evolve past this self-hating, overly moody, selfish unrelatable shell of a human being. Stewart’s acting is wooden, flat, and unbearably stilted, but there really is nothing to work with; she is literally an anti-character, only existing as a shell for other pre-teen girls to self-insert into and having an overly obsessive vampire man fawn over her.

The film is visually uninteresting and very limited in scale for something that could look at least a little interesting thanks to the inclusion of vampires, but that element is so generically handled that it barely changes things from how they look in the normal world. You can tell that the director has more of a preference for more down-to-earth realistic looking set pieces especially ones that can use the handheld style of camerawork to its benefit, but that comes into contrast with the fantastical elements of this story which look really fake and cheap. It’s not like this film had a low budget (it got $37 million to work with) but you can tell from the camera work to the cheap-looking effects to the obvious wire-work that they don’t utilize that budget at all for the right reasons and it just makes things look glaringly funny, even for that time period. The movie is also seeped in this ugly light blue filter that just gets tiring to look at after a while and makes everything in this environment look the same and even the way the camera composes some of these scenes done by cinematographer Elliot Davis, makes it feel much more dated and awkward than it needs to be due to the weird angles. The writing hasn’t devolved into levels of bafflingly silly and hilarious yet, so its stuck in mainly just dumb lines and on occasion overly weird pet names (these vampires love calling people monkeys), but that could be helped out by having Melissa Rosenberg as your writer (who was known for being the head show writer for the earlier seasons of Dexter). This didn’t result in things becoming better from a writing standpoint, but arguably helped out significantly in making it less unbearable.

The funny thing about this first film for Twilight, is that its far less bad than the films that would come later down the line, which in many respects makes it far less entertaining to watch. There are no GOOD movies in this franchise, it’s impossible to even conceive them as having worth for all the terrible messages, pathetic characters, awful writing and insane plot-lines the books delivered to begin with, and the only semblance of good that can come out of them is what other more talented people can offer them and a surreal ”so bad its good” mentality coming from an almost insane writing process, but this movie is strangely more competently put together from a structural level, which just makes it more dull and uninteresting than anything as it isn’t even bad enough to be memorable. A lot of people that worked on this are talented elsewhere and went onto better things, but it’s fairly obvious that they wanted to keep this off their resume. The short of the answer is, if you want to know how NOT to work in a relationship, Twilight is the property for you.