Twilight review

C+ (4.9)


When I see Twilight, I'm thinking of the sort of impact the franchise has been making. They have actors (well, unknown actors) in demand earning about $56 million per movie, have a passionate genre-based audience (majority are teenage girls) and also ressurected the vampire fiction but in a different way. It spawned into related shows and movies such as True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and Let Me In. All of which is based on romance.

So I caught it on TV to see if the big deal is based on the movie and if it was actually bad as I thought it was.

IT's based on the novels from Stephenie Meyer. Meyer's novels are inspired by not just from literature (the first novel is inspired by Romeo and Juliet) but also from her music she's been listening to such as Radiohead, Coldplay, My Chemical Romance, Blue Monday, Linkin Park and most importantly Muse which inspired much of the material.

If you haven't knew the premise of the novels or the movies itself, it's simply a girl named Bella (Kristen Stewart) who enters into a new school, feeling so lonely until... wait for it... she meets a really gorgeous guy named Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and before you know that they're gonna fall in love, he goes on whining about how she might hurt his life when at the same time shows off his supernatural powers.

OK. I'm continuing with my intro. The impact is pretty ruthless, but to the rest of us, who couldn't care less, it's neither their cup of tea nor mine. From the first Twilight, it pretty much starts off the beginning of a new pop culture, where I said it many times before, our generation inherited by our current adolescents is getting dumber and stupider. Where many award ceremonies are surfaced by a vote-many-times-as-you-like system, our radio is playing many cliche songs about love to their youngest audiences, reality shows became trashier by the minute and more recently a revolution rises in Egypt, Twilight is shaping part of today's pop culture to shape the masses' tastes in the most polarising style but their reputation still lives!

I had low expectations for this film because of what I thought from the last paragraph and to say the least, whether or not it is as bad as many people especially the film buffs have said. To tell you the truth, it's not entirely awful.

I'll admit I missed the first thrity minutes but I can figure out the beginning because I have read part of the first novel. But I really liked the cinematography as it is well crafted, the music is actually enjoyable and the first half is sort of slow but eventually it picks itself up when the chemistry between Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson is lifted. What is interesting is that given both director and screenwriter are both female director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg brings up a feminist view for the film which empowers much of the mood delivered in this film.

However, there were some things that totally pissed me off. When I was reading the first novel, I was pissed off with the characters especially Edward who in here just annoys me. Pattinson has to be the vampire who glitters in the sunlight that endlessly stares throughout the whole novel. There's no personality behind him. Kristen Stewart is the same as Pattinson and she's a girl I wish I wouldn't care about because she has no kind of expression whether it's facial or emotional because she looks like a puppet manipulated by the dead. Not to mention that the dialogue given by Rosenberg. It doesn't have faults in it. It's excruciating and deafening.

Twilight is not entirely awful. It's just polarising to many people who either could not stand the phenomenon or who just love the series. It lived up to its heights with three more (should I say four) sequels for their fans and so it ends here.