Twilight

Twilight…was actually surprisingly good.

I fully expected it to be terrible. Indeed, I was hoping for ‘so bad it’s hilarious’. But I’m genuinely surprised that it was a good film. Not a great one, but certainly not a bad one, and rather better than the Harry Potter films, with which Twilight is often compared simply because of the wild successes of both book series.

I’ve read only excerpts of the novel and they all made me cringe. Terrible prose style, dialogue and characters’ thoughts totally one-dimensional, and some really excessive devotion between the characters. I first heard of the book a while back, when the readers’ community I belong to on LJ brought it up a few months after the first of the series came out, and they totally tore it apart, decrying the shallowness of the characters’ attraction to one another (she just loves him and his affection seems mostly based on ‘scent’), so I steered clear.

The film hasn’t made me want to get the books, but it was a pretty solid film. It was slow, but that allowed for a focus on the characters, making the central relationship quite believable, which was what I was expecting to fail. The peripheral characters were broad archetypes, but we were given just enough development, and the Cullen clan was actually pretty damn cool. The story was very obvious but had an acceptable resolution, while leaving plenty open for sequels. And…biggest surprise of all, Robert Pattinson seems to be a far better actor putting on an American accent. Actually, I should credit the director: she captured dialogue with a naturalistic touch: lots of mumbling, hesitation, stuttering et al, giving a layer of much-needed realism. Couple this with some interesting cross-cuts and short scenes that say just enough, and the direction is nice. The baseball game was stylish. The importance placed on a first kiss was also rather cute.

It’s not all good, though: there were a lot of problems. The main antagonist James is presented as powerful but actually poses almost no threat at all and could have been dealt with very easily. The wire work just doesn’t work: there’s no sense of weight, inertia or impact. The plot is quite lazy, really, with Bella conveniently being put in peril at just the right times and the main action part of the plot being paper-thin. It also plays into its audience’s fantasy of popularity by having everyone, and I do mean everyone, inexplicably loving Bella for very little reason. Boys ALL fall for her, for some reason she’s immune to psychics, any rudeness/rejection is quickly forgotten and generally she becomes the centre of attention and universally adored in a rather annoying way.

That said, I like Kristen Stewart, even though the lil’ tomboy of Panic Room is gone and a pretty young woman is there instead. I doubt I’ll watch this again, but I might give the sequels a go, especially if the cute Native American wolf-boy is given more of a role. Because – yay! – he was played by Shark Boy!