Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke
Premise: A teenage girl (Kristin Stewart) new in
town begins a love affair with a vampire (Robert Pattinson).
What Works: The film has some very effective
casting, especially Kristin Stewart who brings a lot of vulnerability to her
role. By far the most interesting scenes in the film are between Stewart’s
character and her father (Billy Burke). The father-daughter relationship is
effectively done and has sufficient humor and rise and fall of emotion that
makes it the best thing the film has to offer.
What Doesn’t: Twilight is plagued by clichés
of recent vampire lore. So much of this film has been done before and done
better in Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, Interview
with the Vampire, True
Blood, Moonlight, Forever Knight, Near Dark,
and The Lost
Boys. The film is also deeply clichéd as a high school romance. Just as
in Mean Girls, Heathers, Cruel
Intentions and a million other stories like it, the shy new girl gets in
with the hip crowd and finds her friend and family relationships strained as a
result. Twilight gets further into trouble in that it does neither the
high school romance genre nor the vampire genre very well. The romance is flat
with the two falling in love right away and the story violates the most basic
guideline of a successful love story, which is to create an impossible obstacle
that keeps the two lovers from getting together. Even though Pattinson’s
character is a vampire, that obstacle is quickly discarded and the movie spends
most of its screen time on repetitious montages of Pattinson and Stewart running
around the woods and laying in the grass together. There is no conflict in the
film until the very end when vampires who look like rejects from Blade show up for no particular reason and instigate some vampire-versus-vampire
warfare, but by then it’s too late and none of it is done that well.
Bottom Line: Twilight is a mediocre vampire film and even worse as a romance. Audiences would be better served by spending their time and money renting some other incarnation of this story on DVD.