"Twilight" (2008) - Movie Review

And so they said, not the vampires in Peoria but the fans of it that the release of this film “Twilight” is going to come and that is the next greatest thing in the world after Obama making the historic win. I got to be under the skins of Michelle from “American Pie” and here it goes, “This one time, when I was tricked by the fallacy of the hype and everything and then I paid like seven dollars to get into this film called Twilight and it went on and on and on…and it was not fun”. The defcon level of disaster increases as I learn that the director is Catharine Hardwicke who gave the wonderful “Thirteen”. What a shame.

I was talking with a colleague of mine who is just out of school and the topic of which film I will be watching this weekend came up. I was saying about the hype of this film and he was asking whether I am aware of what kind it is. I had a slight clue but he put it like this, “teenage vampire romantic love story” and that encompasses everything that makes the film to be judged in a second. So I entered the movie theatre as the regular out of the usual single Indian guy. There have been lots of out of usual when I go to a theatre. The one when I was the only one sitting for an 11:00 clock morning show of “Lions for Lambs”, the one when I was the only person below the age of 50 in the audience and then it is “Twilight”. The single Indian male sitting alone with a majority audience of males been dragged by their girl friends, wives and the mom accompanying their teenage girls. I was talking about the target audience in the previous review for today, “Bolt”. Here they are and the show began.

I would not dare doubt the quality of visuals in the film. The dreary Washington state with rains nullifying the greens while among that dull climate moves Bella (Kristen Stewart) to the town of Forks with her dad Charlie (Billy Burke), the silent chief of police. She is more than welcomed in the high school out there with the kids giving summarization of each group and there comes the Cullen’s family. Everybody is pale as corpse and happiness are wiped clean and immaculate by a cleenex tissue fresh every moment. There is Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and if some one have not figured out that he is the vampire, then they would love this film.

Cullen almost pukes seeing Bella or does he covering his sudden growth of extra teeth to suck the blood of Bella? Oh, I did not know and giggles all over the place. I never understood the giggles as an acknowledgment of the people’s awareness of reading the novel by Stephenie Meyer which gave birth to this film. I remember the reverberating pains of sound waves when I went for the first Harry Potter film. I went away from the thought; anyways some thing propels Bella to go madly in love with this boy who has nothing but shades of doubts and creepiness. Even after coming to be aware of the fact that he and his whole family are controlling their urges to hunt humans for food and he very well is more than a century older than her, she trusts him. Teenage times are for tough in terms of generating unconditional love without anything at all. The same director gave it with a slice of flesh in the reality in “Thirteen”. Here I have to see the credits to believe she directed this.

I had major complaints on two things, screenplay and acting. Screenplay seems to rely on the cool factor of being a vampire and use condescending lines of obviousness coming out as a parade of facades. The baseball scene would be the perfect example. The acting while I would purely judge upon the characters the people were given upon. Kristen Stewart is numb and I would have had her to be the zombie on any day. If at all for her being attractive, she would have not have sold the quarter of the character of Bella. I feel that Robert Pattinson was forced to act in such a way of having an expression of being constantly constipated when he undergoes the pain and agony of oscillation in approaching and avoiding Bella. When he is out of it, he is good and makes Edward work. Rest of the time, he is a pale freaky guy with lipstick and dry hair gel badly in need of a good digestion.

I know that I am coming hard on this film. In fact I am pretty much aware that many teenage fans would mark their memories based on this film. The anticipation and the enthusiasm can be much empathized. Because as some one who got sucked in to the science fiction genre of reading books, I had the same reaction for a film which was called “Sphere”. Michael Crichton who recently died marks a great memory for his impressive books over me and my brother. While we thoroughly enjoyed many of his books, “Sphere” hit on the spot and aspired to develop a fake liking for being a geek. The film came by with a cast of Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone and Samuel L. Jackson and it disappointed in ways I could not imagine. We were in denial for a while but soon swallowed the fact the film just sucked. I made a memory, a bad one and I guess the teenage fans will have one too of “Twilight”.