So. Twilight. Yeah.
I watched it. It took me three attempts, but the second wasn’t so much aborted as interrupted by several minutes of hysterical laughter as I wandered off to clear my head. And let me say right now that at some level I liked the movie. I’m not entirely sure why. I may just be happy that I completed it. It was an odyssey for me, through the mind of Ms. Meyer.
Several months/years ago I intended to watch this thing in the theaters. I’d heard nothing about it beyond it involved vampires, and hey, we all know Mia loves him some vampires, so woot. But when I got to the theater and looked at the movie poster, there was just something about it that told me, “No. This does not concern you.” And taking that advice I wandered off. But time passed, Twiphilia grew, and once more the shadow of an urge to view the thing entered my head. It was like the hazard rising out of the east of Mordor. Or possibly post WW1 Germany. I knew I was going to have to confront the hazard sooner or later, but I let it lie quiescent for a while. That is behind me now. I have met the beast. And it looks like a stripper.
No, really. But I’ll get to that in a second. The movie opens with some odiously melodramatic lines on death. Since vampire movies are pretty much inherently melodramatic though, and teen movies double it, that was par for the course, but all right. I’m kind of down with things that take themselves way too seriously. Anyway, Bella lives in Phoenix, she goes to Forks, Washington, and everyone loves her. No, really, everyone. There is not a damn person in the movie who is not gushing about how awesome Bella is. It’s an opening out of the worst, self-worshiping self insertion fanfic from the desperate mind of a prepubescent fangirl. And I’ve read that, and it was terrible. But nonsense just kept going as all the world, or at least all Forks, grew to a furious frenzy of Bella worship and the praising and the greeting and the taking of the pictures and yeah.
So they introduce the vampire family with an eerie undertone of incest. Now they’re all made out to be fairly attractive, but kind of off. (Ie, that incest undertone. Well, it may not really be an undertone as the characters discuss it immediately upon introduction. But nothing’s really made of it, so maybe an incest angle? It’s mentioned, but not belabored.) Good, because that’s sort of the way a family of passive bloodsuckers should be. Edward gets introduced and the whole cast drools over him, and we all know with the great deal of Bella worship that the author is slinging that the main character is going to be the one girl at that high school worthy of him. Then there’s some high school romance/drama and stuff. The vampires remain kind of distance and eerie. Low, Bella and Edward wind up together, there’s the requisite part where the main character researches vampires because god knows in this day and age there’s a teenager who doesn’t know what a vampire is. Really, people?
Anyway, matters come to a head, she confronts him, he’s all like yeah, and then he eats her. Or at least that’s what happened in my head. No, on the movie screen (my computer monitor, right next to a fairly intense freecell game) he starts whining about being a killer. And I say, ah, no.
Anyway, dude grabs chick, throws her onto his back, and in a impressively bad special effect runs up the hill to reveal himself in daylight. It is there that Twilight: The Sparkling really begins. And it was here that I lost it and had to leave. What? WHAT? Even prepared for it as I was, there was no way that worked. It failed, so catastrophically, that there was nothing to say, do, or think. You know how strippers wear glitter so they show up under the lights? Or how preteen girls do? And they look like a glitter pen vomited onto their faces and just being near one gets bits of shiny shit under your fingernails even though you never even touched the thing and you spend two weeks pulling random ass flakes of sparkly shit out of your fingerprints wondering how the hell that was still there? I mean, you washed your hands already. This is Edward. He is a pale male stripper.
At this juncture the movie takes an important turn. Up until this point it was simply vaguely annoying. Let’s be honest, this isn’t a vampire movie; it’s a teenage female coming of age story with a strong romance angle and that niche is something I have a hard time caring about. It’s the sort of vaguely boring, mostly trivial story about characters who mean little to me set in a premise I cannot identify with outside of the vaguest ‘I was young once too’ angle. But now all that is gone. For the vampires are brought to the fore, and they are insipid. It is dreck. It is drivel. It is so bad it’s awesome.
Vampire baseball. Holy fuckballs, Batman. It is revealed that the vampires are super jocks. They play music and dance. They cook Italian! More people love Bella for no discernible reason! A villain is shoehorned into the story. Edward acts like a toolshed! Oh, wait, that’s been happening all along. Sorry. Anyway, there is a brief tangent along fairly overt ‘does this remind you of anything’ lines where Bella and Edward don’t fuck, but even that gets exploited by the vampires are whiny gas bags angle like the female lead should have. At least from that point on, there is no sparkling. I think the director knew she had to add the sparkly bits for the fans, kind of a homage to the source material, but she didn’t have to like it and even she knew it was fucking retarded. There’s some whining, some driving, one of the other vampires is brought to the fore, the prescient one, and she actually becomes vaguely interesting. Of course that cannot stand else the totally uninteresting lead loses some of her totally undeserved spotlight, so she gets shuffled off. Bella reveals she’s a moron. There’s a really badly choreographed vampire fight. Interesting girl returns and rips someone’s head off, further cementing her position as being the only interesting one, and Bella and Edward whine at each other a lot. The End.
The actors do not emote. At all. We all know highschoolers. They’re not exactly subtle people. You really don’t spend that much time wondering what one is thinking. Not so with the actors. Except, of course, for the possibility that the teenager isn’t thinking anything at all. That could be happening for this cast. But really, I cannot say enough about how atrocious this is, except that it definitely went around the corner and came back to being delightful. They sparkle. They play baseball. They cook Italian food. They’re vegetarians. These things I knew, but I hadn’t really paid attention to. I sort of expected this to be explained away during the story. It was. It sucks.
What’s odd about this is there were glimmers of ‘this could have been interesting.’ The bit where supertwit drops her apple and Edward catches it and gives it back was startlingly well done, and understated enough that it was not ruined by stupid later. Also, I kind of liked her truck. Seemed an interesting thing to throw at a teenage female lead. The part where he pops the dent out was also interesting. Small, almost throwaway details, like that did a good job. Of course, it’s like a crappy rail vodka being served in a nice glass.
Watch it. Just don’t spend money on it. It isn’t worth a one dollar red box rental.
