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'Twilight' satisfies with romantic vampire story
Movie Review: Twilight
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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Humans always want what they can’t have. In Twilight, a teen romance with a beguiling twist, we learn that a sweet, oddly awkward, dreamboat of a young vampire named Edward wants what he can’t have, too. Forbidden fruit is the most desired. All of which makes Twilight the perfect impossible romance.
Edward Cullen meets Bella Swan in biology class. Bella, the new girl at Forks High School, doesn’t run with the heard. She’s attractive but no stereotypical beauty. For instance, even though she’s just moved to the misty, Pacific Northwest from sunny Phoenix, she does not have a tan.
Edward and Bella are immediately drawn to one another. But Edward being a vampire who lusts after human blood, there are stumbling blocks to their potential relationship. Imagine, if you will, Bella introducing Edward to her very protective dad, who happens to be a police chief investigating the mysterious, grisly murders of a few locals.
“Dad, this is Edward,” Bella says. “He’s a vampire.”
Twilight, based on the first of a series of best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, takes the author’s love story about teens from different worlds to the screen in sensitive style. Twilight plays like a film made from a feminine perspective. Despite some blood-thirsty vampire action, director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, The Nativity Story) avoids explicit violence and gore. And the screenplay Melissa Rosenberg (Party of Five, The O.C.) assembles from Meyer’s book is 90 percent romance, 10 percent horror movie.
An introductory voiceover from Kristen Stewart, who plays Bella, further establishes Twilight’s feminine perception, which continues with the custom-tailored leading man, Edward. He’s so devoted, protective, gentle. Silly, selfish human boyfriends can’t touch the immortal Edward, a saint trapped in his glistening vampire skin.
Playing Edward with his male-model’s face and pompadour, London-born actor Robert Pattinson (previously seen in Harry Potter movies) follows the lead of such classic teen idols as James Dean and the young Elvis Presley. Young women in the audience at a Tuesday night Twilight preview in New Orleans produced a collective sigh-murmur when he first appeared on screen.
Edward strikes Bella as mysterious, secretive, impossible and, naturally, irresistible. Edward’s conflicting thoughts and emotions require Pattinson to do a lot of interior acting. Obviously, a handsome young vampire trying to pass for human in a public high school has a few things to hide.
But Edward and his mostly human-friendly family are not stereotypical vampires. Instead of creeping through the dank hallways of a crumbling castle that has coffins stowed in its cobwebbed bowels, they dwell in a beautiful house in the woods, one suitable for any well-to-do human family. And they venture into the human world even during daylight hours, which explains how Edward, a perpetual teen, can attend high school.
By traditional vampire and horror movie standards, such benign behavior is a stretch, but Twilight, a gentler, kinder vampire tale, actually gets away with its revisionist vision, creating something fresh, fun and, of course, romantic.
Despite its cartoony special effects and rudimentary cinematography, this successful first film adaptation from the Twilight saga, the ending of which is loaded with possibilities, suggests another blockbuster film franchise has been born.
