Twilight (2008)

Brief: Bella (Kristen Stewart) moves to small town Forks, Washington with her dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), after her mom gets remarried. She gets instantly obsessed with Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who seems repulsed by her but saves her from a car accident. Turns out that thing about Edward is, well, he's a vampire.

Rarely have I read the book before I've seen the movie. Sometimes I read the book afterwards (e.g. Bridget Jones's Diary, Little Women, Gone with the Wind), but, if I haven't read the book before hand, I usually never do. Twilight is a special case: two friends read it in anticipation of the movie, and I followed suit.

I can see why Stephenie Meyer's series is so popular with the pre-teen and teen set: smart ordinary girl, Adonis vampire-boy. It's the kind of doomed, helpless romance that would have had me in tears at 12, and you can burn through it in a weekend. Meyer taps into teen angst deftly, and vampirism as a metaphor for sex has been popular with teen girls for some time. It works because it has all the big scariness of sex (desire/danger/intimacy) without any of the actual scariness of sex (sex). Edward's filled with an overwhelming desire to drink Bella's blood (sex!), but he resists (chastity!). Dreamy, right?

Except that Edward and Bella are easily the least interesting characters in the book. Meyer's does her character and the audience a disservice by making Bella so obviously depressed. Nothing matters to her save Edward, and it makes Bella seem boring and silly (although realistically teenage). Her depression, and the suicidal tendencies that go along with it, go unaddressed. The worst sections of the book are devoted to the time that Bella spends thinking alone and to Edward and Bella's declarations/arguments of love.

Forsooth, I can see how Edward would develop an OME following. On the surface, at least. He's exceptionally good looking, smart, and charming, and he spends all his days struggling against his near-overwhelming natural inclination in order to be with the woman he loves. Once you get past those qualities, though, you can see that he's selfish (according to him, he loves her so much more than Bella loves him), controlling (it works in life or death situations, less so in the cafeteria), and a lunatic drama queen. The latter is actually my favourite quality for its unintentional hilarity. Edward never says anything; he prefers to whisper, chuckle, or roar. Edward's not Edward unless he's freaking the fuck out over one thing or another.

Going into this, I worried for Pattinson and Stewart. If Bella's to be taken as a reliable narrator (and let's just say she is, given her attention to Edward), Pattinson's got his work cut out for him: impossibly beautiful, graceful, and eerie, Edward's mouth doesn't match his eyes 90% of the time. Bella's less a character than an audience stand-in (another reason girls love this stuff), so she's got to be all things to all people: depressed without being off-putting, smart without being arrogant, a crafty manipulator of her peers without being condescending. Oh, and believably klutzy. That's my favourite of Bella's characteristics, actually, because it makes her seem more real and more likely to notice how gracefully the vampires move.

What a wonderful surprise it was, then, to see how well Pattinson and Stewart pull it off. Stewart makes Bella a little more sassy and a lot more present, and she has a winning way of pacing certain lines so that they seem more natural and less crazy. She immediately follows up one of Bella's more ridiculous lines, "I'm only afraid of losing you," with another line almost directly on top, playing the scene as though Bella's embarrassed to have said that out loud. It works because her choice makes it feel genuine.

Pattinson's saddled with the more ridiculous character, so it's fortunate that screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg chose to sidestep a lot of Edward's worst characteristics. As written, Pattinson's free to play Edward as teen-in-love first, vampire second. He nails the first scene in the bio lab: we can see how Bella could easily read his reaction as repulsion and how it's obviously (to the audience) an overpowering desire to kill. Later, in the car, when he turned red and let out a high pitched laugh, I totally bought that as a moment of flat out panic. Mostly he toes the line between sexy and creepy, but there are occasions of overacting. At least the chemistry between Stewart and Pattinson is there, though. Damn.

I've liked director Catherine Hardwicke for a while now, and she certainly seems like a natural to take on this tale of teen angst. It wasn't until I started noticing the visual clues she put in (Edward proffers an apple, he sports an arm cuff with the Quileute symbol for cold one) that I started to think of her as clever. Well played, Hardwicke. As much as I thank Rosenberg for reeling the story in, Hardwicke's the one who pushed it out into the lush surroundings (stunning work by DP Elliot Davis) and past the essential whiteness of Meyer's story into colour blind territory. She even has us meet the trio of bad vamps (Cam Gigandet, Rachelle Lefevre, and Edi Gathegi) early, erasing the inertia of the source text.

All in all, it's quite the successful translation. Now if only they could have made it not quite so silly, and given the Cullens more to do. Kellan Lutz nails Emmett in few moments he has on screen, but I always want to spend more time with Carlisle (an unfortunately dyed but otherwise great Peter Faccinelli), Esme (a well-cast Elizabeth Reaser), Rosalie (a well turned bitch in Nicki Reed's hands, although the blonde hair makes her look more like Isla Fisher), Alice (total badass Ashley Greene), and Jasper (an oddly played but still adorable Jackson Rathbone). At least that baseball scene totally fucking rules. Of course they would wear those outfits. B

Also, I don't know if you know this, but Twilight coverage is hilarious. I mean, "Edward Cullen is a dreamboat Nosferatu for Hannah Montana times."? Funny stuff. Very funny.