Movie Review: An anemic 'Twilight' may leave viewers cold
cmeyer@sacbee.com
Published Friday, Nov. 21, 2008
2 stars
From the sometimes-silly glower-fest known as "Twilight," Robert Pattinson emerges a movie star.
Pattinson embodies teen vampire Edward Cullen, a figure of such chiseled perfection in Stephenie Meyer's 2005 novel that he evoked a Greek god rather than a Forks, Wash., high school junior. Or rather, a statue of a Greek god, given his chilly skin, powdery complexion and capacity for complete stillness.
Though not as well-built as Edward was in the book, Pattinson is everything else, capturing Edward's intellectual and physical confidence, air of danger and yearning for Bella (Kristen Stewart),the new girl in town.
If Pattinson sometimes falls prey to close-ups that render him too moony or pained-looking, such missteps can be excused in a relative newcomer (he's best known for playing Cedric in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix") expected to carry a film based on a beloved young-adult best-seller.
That expectation might not exist were co-star Stewart more dynamic. Unremarkable apart from her resemblance to Lindsay Lohan's companion Samantha Ronson, Stewart is in some ways a fine choice for Bella, the clumsy, self-effacing everygirl to whom most readers of the novel could relate. But although Stewart has the unassuming part down, she never projects any quality special enough to explain why Edward falls for her.
It doesn't help Stewart's cause that her character sometimes seems too docile or merely entranced by her vampire beau. In truncating the novel, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg omitted its most most swooningly romantic passages. These passages explained Bella's inability to resist a creature so attractive in appearance, word and deed that she would follow him anywhere while forgiving his stalkerlike tendency to follow her everywhere.
Bloodlust as a metaphor for sexual lust fuels all vampire stories, and especially one involving adolescence. But in the book, Edward is drawn to Bella because of, but also despite, his pressing urge to bite a neck that seems to have been prepared by some cosmic chef to suit his particular vampire palate. Though her scent alone nearly knocks him over, he sticks close to the one person he should avoid because he finds her endearing and smart.
The movie only imparts some of this, with director Catherine Hardwicke ("thirteen"; "Lords of Dogtown") focusing much of her energy on action scenes, in the process underscoring the truism that unless a Harry Potter-size budget is involved, fantastical scenes are better left to the imagination. Judging from a scene in which Edward runs at hyper speed, the makers of "Twilight" worked with something more akin to a "Six Million Dollar Man" budget.
Hardwicke certainly can set a mood and create a sense of place. She imparts the double-edged sword of life in the Pacific Northwest, which offers positives (it's green, wooded, amenable to gorgeous vampires) and negatives (constant rain, black ice, also amenable to creepy vampires).
The film picks up considerably in its final hour, when Hardwicke shows a flair for fight scenes as well as for quiet moments involving Bella and her divorced dad (Billy Burke), Forks' police chief and a longtime bachelor struggling to accommodate a teenage daughter who for most of her life lived with her mother in Arizona. Stewart does her best acting opposite Burke.
These scenes also stand out because Hardwicke lets them reach their natural ending. Too often in this poorly edited film, Hardwicke cuts away just as things seem to be unfolding.
Even in this age of hyperkinetic editing, the cuts in "Twilight" are awkward and disconcerting. They make one wish the director would have let these scenes flow and saved her trims for those lingering shots of Pattinson and others smoldering so intensely they look ridiculous rather than menacing.
ETA: another review where the reviewer has actually read the books.
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