My old college roomate, the ubiquitous Lou Hutter, knowing I was a writer and never able to resist any opportunity to jab me, whenever we were watching some particularly obnoxious bad bit of television, would turn to me and ask, in a deadpan voice, "Did you write this?"
I'm sure, if we had ever watched either of the Twilight movies together, I'd be hearing that question every five minutes. So, with that as a starting point, and having now seen both Twilight and Twilight New moon and, with the impending summer release of the third, I felt compelled to write a combined review of the two.
Is there any blood? Do the two principles ever fuck? Is there any real fear generated? Is there ever any goddamn forward narrative motion? Do any of these characters evolve? No. No. No. No. And no. In a nutshell, this is moviemaking for the Miley Cyrus set.
I haven't read the books so I can't comment on whether the adaptation of the series by bored housewife turned writer Stephenie Meyer, is successful or not. I can, however comment on the films. They suck. No, they really suck. Now that I've given you my professional summary let's look at why they suck.
In Twilight, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) meets the mysterious and dazzlingly beautiful Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a boy unlike any she's ever met. Edward is a vampire, but he doesn't have fangs and his skin is all sparkly like diamonds in the sun. They fall in love, meet Edward's nice vampire family. But, all is not well, some other vampires- not nice this time, come into the area and want to suck Bella dry and kill the Cullens.
Fully a half of the first movie is shot with the camera spinning in dizzying circles around Bella and Edward while they stare longingly at each other against a Pacific Northwest background of mountains and big trees. Kristen Stewart has been good in other films, like Adventureland, but here, her fragile broken bird thing gets really old by about the one hour mark. Pattison acts like he's stoned on Valium or looks like he's in pain from getting a phone call from his agent that he has to do two more of these movies. There's one okay action sequence when the vampires fight, shot with a mix of speed up and slow motion camera work.
You now don't need to see Twilight because I have hit all the high points. It just never gets going. Having two good looking people stare at each other for 90 minutes does not a film make. The whole thing is so ponderous and self-important, yet- and here's the reason it fails so utterly- we're never given the reason why everything Bella or Edward feels so deeply is so important. I would say the screenplay sucked but I'm not sure there was one, other than page 30-75 Bella and Edward look at each other with longing.
In New Moon, Edward leaves Bella, to protect her from bad vampires that hunt him. Bella is depressed for months, and the 40 minutes of the movie that deal with Bella's depression feel like months. To make matters worse, the moviemakers made the unfortunate decision to have Bella narrate all that pain- apparently they felt that showing scene after scene of her walking alone in the woods or gazing at the sea wasn't enough for the perceived stupidity of their tweener audience, and that Bella needed to, in mundane language, narrate every single, more or less identical, diary entry. It's infuriating.
During all this, Edward pops up as a ghost or a voice in her consciousness or something: "Don't do this Bella", "Go there", "Don't go here". At one point Bella's jumping off a cliff into the sea, and Edward's ghost, or vampire-link or undead Tweet or whatever, tells her not to jump. If you look carefully, on Bella's other shoulder, you can see me. I'm there yelling, "JUMP! For god's sake end it."
Anyway... during Bella's depression, she's cheered up by childhood friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who's actually in training to be a werewolf. Seriously. I can hear Lou now, "Did you write this?". There's some kind of half ass treaty between werewolfs and vampires in this area, although we're not given any real detail about the history. So Bella's now torn between a vampire and a werewolf. The Native American boys who are werewolves walk around in knee length cutoffs and canvas low cut Converse all stars. They all seem to forget their shirts most of the time in 40 degree rain.
Taylor Lautner does his best to pretend he's Mario Lopez(dimples, muscles, utterly devoid of talent). The fact that this seventeen year old kid with no acting chops is given a large role in a sixty million dollar movie is yet another, as if we needed one, evidence of the moviemakers utter dismissal of craft.
There is one reasonably good sequence in New moon. Edward believing Bella died during her cliff jump, has gone to the vampire royalty, the Volturi, to ask to die since he can't live without Bella. The fact that there is a vampire ruling faction is old hat for vampire movies but at least some real actors show up on the council to show the good-looking children actors how to act. Dakota Fanning is okay here, in a tiny role, but Michael Sheen as the leader, steals the scene. He camps it up, being gracious but threatening at the same time. It's the lone fun moment in either of these pompous films.
It's my belief that these films and probably the books as well, are so popular because tweeners have been instructed by the media to like them, and wanting to be cool, they do. I'm actually worried about Pattison and Stewart, both of them seem ill-equipped to handle this level of fame. And I think they're both conflicted by knowing their fame has nothing to do with their limited talents.
There are lots of vampire movies and this is near the worst of them- if you want to see a better one featuring star-crossed good-looking kids, try Katheryn Bigelow's Near Dark, a low budget affair for sure, but light years better than Twilight's what I can only describe as drivel.
"Did you write this?"
No I didn't.
Rating:
Twilight New Moon
Plot: 17 14
Presentation: 25 26
Character: 13 17
Total: 55 57
