Twilight - The Movie Review

Like most in my age group, I am a huge Harry Potter fan.  So when a good friend of mine told me about the Twilight series, I had to read it.  I enjoyed the book, though not at first.  It took me a while to get past Stephenie Myers' writing style, but I finished the whole series in two weeks' time.  When I heard that a movie was coming out based on the first novel, a month after I'd heard about the books, I was ecstatic.  Something for me to do while I await the next Harry Potter film!

I waited a couple weeks for the fanatic crowd to make their rounds before I went to see the movie.  I don't know about everyone else, but I can't stand sitting next to someone who is 1) dressed up in fan attire, and 2) likes to sit and immediately point and say, "That is nothing like the book."  Save those comments for after the movie, thank you.  Which is what I have done.  And now, two or three months later so that everyone who wanted to see the movie did, I am ready to write about it.

At first, I was too excited to sit still.  I love watching my favorite books come alive and I was very curious as to how they would pull this one off, with the vampires and everything.  It started out fine, except Kristen Stewart was speaking in monotone, but I figured she would become more dynamic as the movie progressed.  I imagine that it's very difficult to not sound monotone when you're narrating.  So I sat through and waited for the movie to pick up.  I found the first fifteen chapters of the book before Bella and Edward finally became friends to be unbearably slow and I expected as much from the movie.  I was correct about the progression, but incorrect with my assumption that Kristen Stewart would actually start acting.  The monotone continued until the end of the movie.

Despite the bad acting on Kristen Stewart’s part, I found the movie to be entertaining, though lacking.  I felt that the writers removed some essential scenes and character pieces and that they added some equally unnecessary content.  For instance, the whole scene with Bella, Alice, and Jasper in the hotel after they flee Forks was quite important to the rest of the series, I thought.  Especially when Alice explains to Bella what she saw in her vision of her (she and Bella would be best friends and Bella would become a vampire, for those of you who only saw the movie) and when she explains how a person comes to be a vampire.  Maybe they weren't as important as I thought they were, but they seemed important.  I also felt like they did no justice to Rosalie.  Yes, Nikki Reed was gorgeous, just as she should have been.  However, in the series, Rosalie Hale is a very tragic character - how she was forced to become a vampire, how she would have to suffer the rest of eternity watching other people live the life she wishes she could have, how she was betrayed.  I know most of this wasn't explained until the third book (Eclipse), but I still felt that Stephenie Meyers gave her a tragic feel throughout all of the books, though her energy was misunderstood as hatred.  In the movie, she was just a hateful ***********; It bothered me a little that she was portrayed in this way.  I also felt that Carlisle's story should have been explained.  Maybe not in the amount of detail as was in the book, but it would have cleared up some things for those who didn't read the books.

As for said unnecessary scenes, did we really need to see Edward climb up a tree with Bella on his back?  That was useless.  And then the two-minute panning over the trees.  Who cares?  They're trees.  I've seen trees before.  I felt that the scene they replaced with that garbage was much more useful, and probably wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as that ****** "monkey" scene.  I also felt that the fight scene lasted too long, since it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.  However, it was nice to get to see what could have possibly happened while Bella was unconscious in the book.

Now for the scene that most who didn't read the books probably hated: the "Edward Sparkles" scene.  Yes, yes, I know: we like our vampires to be metrosexual (by the way, I hate the "I like my vampires sparkly" shirts - please).  I've heard this about a dozen times.  I've come to the conclusion that for a book/movie for teenagers, this was a little necessary and if you think about it for a minute, it makes perfect sense.  The vampire folklore states that vampires only come out at night because the sun will kill them.  Well, the main character in this vampire series is a seventeen-year-old high school girl who probably has a curfew.  She can't be running around at night with vampires, ESPECIALLY with a father who is the chief of police.  So Meyers needed to find another alternative.  This boy has to go to high school, because where else is a teenage girl, who is new to the neighborhood, going to meet a boy?  High school is the logical choice.  He has to come out during the day, but he doesn't have to go out in the sun as long as he stays somewhere like Forks, somewhere the sun almost never shines.  I'm not sure why she chose sparkles over ugliness or something else (possibly because it's a story for teenage girls and a good majority of them love sparkles), but she did.  The only real theory I have been able to come up with for the justification of the sparkles is that vampires are so pale, but Bella is also described as being pale, so there has to be a barrier.  How pale is the vampire?  So pale that every one of his skin cells acts as a crystal.  He's transparent.  My only problem with the sparkles is that they didn't really stand out - I had trouble seeing whether or not he was actually sparkling.  It looked more like they just dumped a bunch of glitter on them and said, "Boy, I hope this shows up on camera!"

On a more positive side, the soundtrack was wonderful!  I purchased it before the movie was out in theaters and LOVED it.  Muse is one of my favorite groups, so "Supermassive Black Hole" was a real treat.  I actually had my mind pretty set on where I felt each song should relate to each scene, but I got it completely wrong.  I thought it a bit strange where Catherine Hardwicke decided to put each song the first time, but it wasn't so bad once I had time to think about it.  It was a nice soundtrack, anyway.  Though a bit of a rip-off that they won't put the last song that Robert Pattinson sang on the CD...you have to purchase the CD on iTunes, which does me no good, as I have no iPod.

Overall, I felt that the movie was merely OK, but I would definitely see it again.  I'm really anticipating the DVD release, though mostly for the special features.  I hope the new director can make New Moon more exciting, since that book was a snore on its own.