What I thought of Twilight, the movie

As people who follow me on Twitter will be aware, I spent the better part of yesterday and today reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, all 498 pages, in a frenzied rush to finish it before I was to take the girls to see the movie. It's among the stranger reading experiences I've, er, experienced in my life, because of the sheer number of pages that I got through in so short a time. But again, Compulsion was sitting on my chest like some marble-skinned vampire.

Anyway, I've yet to write up a review but in short my verdict on the book is, I liked it. For those who aren't in the know, it features a family--in the loose sense--of vampires who are, as described in the book, beautiful creatures. Heart-stoppingly perfect in appearance, in fact. They glide across surfaces with inhuman grace. Their skin is flawless. One looks at them and forgets to breathe, so amazingly attractive are they. Their eyes dazzle you. They smell good. One can understand, given all this, how Bella, the book's human heroine, could so quickly fall under the spell of the enigmatic, "mysteriously sexy" (as Rebecca put it) Edward Cullen. Who wouldn't?

Apparently the folks casting the movie Twlight decided to do away with all that "inhumanly attractive" nonsense. The vampires in the movie range from an okay-looking-but-hardly-perfect Robert Pattinson as Edward to the Tim Burtonesque Jackson Rathbone and Ashley Greene to the pasty-faced father-figure of the group, Dr. Carlisle Cullen. Hard to believe that this group of wild-eyes weirdoes inspires anything other than grimaces when they walk in a room, let alone swooning adoration. Ironically, the most attractive male character in the movie was Bella's father Charlie (Billy Burke). This certainly was not the intent of the producers.

There's also just some general hokey-ness about the film, reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the movie. (Well, Twilight wasn't quite as hokey as that.) Kristen Stewart, however, who played Isabella, was very good in it, as was Billy Burke.

Comments

[Mandy McClanahan]

1.

I agree that the Cullens family was not what I expected from reading the novel before hand.

I don't think the movie was anymore hokey than the novel. They are both cute and fun, and definitely aimed at the teeny-bopper market. I enjoyed both, but like the books much more.

[Clare D]

2.

Heh heh - excellent review, Debra. That description in the book would certainly be a difficult one to match, and I do wonder what the casting directors, and indeed the actors themselves, thought when they encountered it. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps - and then...'Next.'

[Debra Hamel]

3.

Yeah, I just don't know. They could have used lighting or something to accent the people. Some of the makeup was awful. It's just that their inhuman gorgeousness was such a main point of the book. Ah well.