stick to the book

Rating: 3/10 (20 November 2009)

OK, it's pretty much a given that no movie was ever going to completely live up to the book. Still, I can't express in words what a massive disappointment this movie was for me. While it did touch on just about all that happened in the book, it didn't have any flow. I also felt whenever the actors were supposed to deliver any lines seething with emotion, they didn't do it. It was very daytime soap opera-sh for me. I honestly thought that Bella and Jacob's characters were very much lacking in that department. Even though the movie was over 2 hrs long, I felt it could have been a better movie if it was longer, so they could have delved deeper in these scenes than they did. The whole movie felt rushed, like they were trying to throw as much of the book as they could into a 2 hr time slot, and then chopped the scenes in half or more.
My other disappointment was the Volturi fight scene, though I would have taken it happily if the other parts of the movie had just been better. For anybody who has read the book, we know there is no fight scene in the book. It would have been hard to really show the tension we all read in the book, but I think they could have done it. The whole thing with the Volturi is that they never actually fight them, there's just the anticipation of the fight. The idea that I got from the books was that they could never fight them, because they could never win. Also, the scene where they show how Alice is showing Aro how she sees Bella as one of them.......terrible. They could have shown the whole family together, sitting around talking, and Bella looks up and her eyes are golden, or something better than Edward dressed like a schoolboy, and the two of them frolicking through the forest. Everybody in the theater was laughing. I hated that they screwed with some scenes from the book. When Edward and Bella reunite in Volterra, he seems very standoff-sh to her in the book, and she is thinking he will just take off again when they get back to Forks. Then, when she wakes up in her room with him beside her, that's when everything is supposed to unfold, about how he left her for her own protection, he still loves her, they kiss, etc. I absolutely hate it when screenwriters take matters into their own hands, and feel they can do it better than the author. The reason people have been dying to see this movie is because of the author, because they loved the book, so stick to the book. Conclusively, I felt like the scenes were rushed through, the acting was lacking emotion, and they left out some really important stuff to add scenes like showing the plane flying in the sky, or showing Victoria running through the woods with the wolves,(a scene that was never in the book), and the author's perfection was tampered with.