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I’m always just a little bit nervous when I walk into the theater to see the movie adaptation of a book I loved. On one hand, I can’t wait to see it all play out on a big screen in front of me. On the other hand, I worry that the director’s vision won’t live up to my own lofty expectations—and something will be lost in translation. In the case of director Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance, Twilight, I found that the story that played out in my head as I read the book was more convincing—and less angsty—than the one that played out on the screen.
Like the wildly popular teen novel on which it’s based, Twilight is the dark and dramatic story of an unlikely romance between a vampire and a mortal.
Kristen Stewart stars as Bella Swan, an awkward teenager who moves to the tiny town of Forks, Washington, to live with her dad, Charlie (Billy Burke). As she’s settling into her new life, Bella finds herself strangely drawn to dark, mysterious Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson).
Though he warns her to stay away from him—for her own good—Bella can’t resist her beautiful, brooding classmate. And by the time she discovers that Edward’s a vampire, she’s already fallen in love with him.
Edward and his “family” are a different kind of vampires—those who can live among mortals because they’ve learned to control their thirst for blood. But a pack of the other kind of vampires is killing its way through Forks, forcing Edward to protect Bella—or risk spending the rest of eternity without her.
Twilight is definitely a moody and mysterious story. Forks is a drab, rainy place—and it’s inhabited by vampires. It doesn’t get much darker or more mysterious than that. And while Hardwicke does an excellent job of translating that dark, gloomy atmosphere to the screen, she takes it just a bit too far, moving beyond dark and mysterious to heavy and dismal. Especially in the first half of the film, everything is so angsty that it’s just plain exhausting.
With the exception of a handful of wild-and-crazy high school students (who seem to have wandered onto the set from a completely different movie), everyone is deep and pensive and brooding. No one smiles—ever. In fact, most of the characters spend most of the movie scowling. Bella is upset that Edward won’t tell her anything about himself. The townspeople seem to be infuriated simply by Edward’s existence. And Edward…well, he’s an angry, tortured soul—and Pattinson plays him with such deep, fervent angst that it’s often laughable.
It seems as though Hardwicke was so desperate to get the story’s angst across to viewers that everything else took a back seat. She spends so much time on long, somber close-ups that she forgets to develop the characters—or their story. Yes, there’s a love story—and, fortunately, it comes through at times—but it often feels rushed and underdeveloped.
In the last 45 minutes or so, however, the story finally picks up. Starting with a scene in which Edward’s family gets together to play baseball, Hardwicke lets up on the gloom for a while and allows her characters to show a lighter side. It doesn’t last, but that’s okay—since the rest of the movie is thrilling and suspenseful, as Bella tries to outrun bloodthirsty tracking vampire James (Cam Gigandet).
In the end, while I still enjoyed seeing the familiar story on the screen, Twilight didn’t live up to my expectations—because it’s too heavy on teen angst and too light on development. Then again, I watched it with one guy who liked the movie much more than the book—and another guy who hadn’t read the book and didn’t like the movie at all. And the teenage girls who showed up eight hours before the screening thought it was the best movie ever made. So, really, it all depends on your point of view—and, if you read the book, how it all played out in your head.
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