Bonus Blog: Twilight...My Review

If you've read my blog on any given week, I have a tendency to rant. My favourite ranting topic o' the moment is Stephanie Meyer and the awfulness of Breaking Dawn. I'm also not much of a Meyer fan in general. I read Twilight a while ago, before I knew about the Twi-hards or (Twi-tards, as I prefer) and the Twilight moms. I thought it was an ok book, one by which Anne Rice should feel a little plagerized but I sort of understood why it reached teens. The rest of the series was bland and silly with the exception of Breaking Dawn which should never have been published without mass rewriting and editing.

My hatred of Breaking Dawn retroactively made me despise anything to do with Meyer and Twilight and so when the movie became the cover story for Entertainment Weekly on a regular basis or, at the very least, a huge space-stealer, I was irritated beyond belief. I was sick to death of the hype and still, to this day, can't understand why Entertainment Weekly and other magazines could not promote the far-superior Stardust movie last year with the same gusto. Stardust, based on the Neil Gaiman book, was cute, clever, romantic, hilarious and just a fun ride that makes me want to rewatch it over and over. The original book is a grown-up fairy tale, written with lyric and simplicity and worth ten of Twilight any day.

Yet, because I am a fair Monkeypants, I knew I couldn't complain about a movie without seeing it and so, I knew I had to see Twilight. After all, I'm a firm believer that you can't mock properly without having done your research.

I had no expectations. I expected it to stink. The previews had done nothing to prove otherwise. So I went into the theatre, expecting to snort with derision and emerge at the end, satisfied that I'd been right.

Truth is, that didn't happen. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a good movie by any means. It just wasn't as horrible as I expected. Given my earlier scathing comments, that's high praise.

Let's start with what I liked. I thought that the scene in which Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and Bella Swan (Kristin Stewart) are paired as lab partners was awesome. The look of revulsion on Edward's face was perfect. The problem was, it made me wonder how much cooler the books would have been if he had continued to loathe her. So much more interesting than puppy-love, don't you think?

Yet this scene made me feel differently about Robert's portrayal of Edward. I got a strong feeling that he was almost mocking the character as he portrayed him, that there was a snarky and bitter undertone in his performance that played perfectly on screen. I'm probably wrong but I felt like Robert didn't think much to Edward and that added a rather good layer to the character who otherwise is one of the wussiest, blandest vampires ever to grace the fiction world.

I also liked Billy Burke's portrayal of Charlie Swan, Bella's dad. In the books, the character has always been rather obtuse and uninvolved in his daughter's romantic entanglement with vampires. Even when she disappeared for months and then re-appeared as a vampire in Breaking Dawn, all it took was for a football game on TV to distract him. I get the feeling that the movie Charlie would kick that Charlie's arse. He's protective, wry and funny. Granted, the man is town Police Chief and he cleans his gun while drinking beer but he's funny and I loved the layers he gave a somewhat background character.

I also actually enjoyed the baseball scene. Set to Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole", the scene is fun and enjoyable. Then again, I've always liked Muse so maybe that was why.

So, see, I can be nice. But I can also be scathing. For example, though Bella Swan has always baffled me as to why Edward can love such a drip, Kristin Stewart's portrayal is beyond dull. She's very pretty and has good hair in the movie. However, she delivers Bella's lines in a monotonal fashion that show that she, like us, is bored with the character. The turning point in the movie in which it went from being decent to being bad was the scene where she confronts Edward and tells him she knows he's a vampire. Ugh. The way she says her lines: "Your skin is ice-cold and pale..." and all that stuff is cringeworthy.

Speaking of lines, there are some stinkers in there. The two worst, sadly, are taken directly from Meyer's book: "And so the lion fell in love with the lamb" and "You're my special brand of heroin". Really? I HATE the lion/lamb line. It makes me think of one of those high-school freshman who want to be writers journaling in their notebook, writing what they think is deep prose but really is a glorified diary entry.

Then there's the special effects. I know the budget sucked for the movie but it seems that they skimped on areas that should have had the most attention paid to them. We didn't need to see Edward jump and run up so many trees. The money spent on that would much better have been spent on makeup. Seriously, Carlisle Cullen looks terrible. You can see the pancake makeup piled on. Maybe it was the blonde hair but he looked washed out and unattractive.

The scene in which Edward shows why he can't go out in the sun (he sparkles- in case you hadn't read the book) was awful. He looked sweaty. He didn't look like "he'd been sprinkled with diamond dust" as the book so frequently and gushingly describes. He looked wet and sweaty.

And then there are the rest of the Cullens. Alice was pretty good, very accurate to the way she is in the book. Emmett was supposed to be strong and big but he looked like a lumberjack to me. Rosalie, played by Nikki Read, was over-acted and pretty terrible. And then there was Jasper. He stood there with a blank look on his face. He's supposed to be able to calm people's emotions, that's his Vampire Power. I now call him Jasper Scissorhands because his hair and facial expression are so much like Edward Scissorhands, he should be sued.

Overall, there were moments where I was entertained. I only cringed a couple of times. I won't mention the author's cameo in the movie. It irritated me, let's leave it at that.

I wouldn't recommend Twilight. It isn't good. It's the type of movie that, if it didn't have an army of militant fans, would probably have flopped and emerged as a DVD rental. It's ok. It's watchable but it won't explain to the non-Twilight readers what all the fuss is about. Harry Potter it is not but then, it doesn't even deserve to be placed in comparison with those books though I'm reading otherwise.

I had to review this movie since I've ragged on the subject so much. I think perhaps if it was viewed as a comedy, it'd be better. I can't help but think Robert Pattinson might like that. Yet, overall, it wasn't as painful as I expected. But it wasn't good. And that, for now, is all I have to say about that.