Embarrassing

Rating: 1/10 (13 November 2009)

Just to put my review in the right context: Yes, I am a Twilight series fan. However, my opinion about the movie Twilight has very little to do with that.
It took me about a year after reading the series to finally build up the courage to see the movie. Partly because I didn't want to ruin the faces that my personal imagination had put unto the character's faces and also because a movie rarely is satisfactory after reading the book first. Lord of the Rings being one of the exceptions I can think of right now.
After finally watching the movie I was left mainly feeling embarrassed for Stephenie Meyer and baffled that a movie like that ever made it to the big screen, let alone became such a sensation. The movie just doesn't make sense. And here's my big issue:
I certainly get that movies do not always have to be exact replicas of the books they came from. I have no problem with that. It seems that that is exactly what they tried to do with Twilight, since they certainly added quite a lot of scenes to the movie that are nowhere to be found in the novel and completely changed the setting (and feel) of several key scenes. So they wanted to kind of step away from the book. Fine. Then why, oh why is the movie completely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read the book? It's like they haphazardly picked scenes from the book and then threw them into the movie without bothering about continuity or actually connecting them as to make it clear to the viewer what's going on, why and how this all came about. Everyone that I have talked to that had seen the movie without reading the book, admitted they really couldn't make sense of what was going on. Go figure. Either make the die hard fan happy by giving an exact rendition of the book (especially in the key scenes) or throw it all overboard to make a stellar movie mainly based on the book, while taking a lot of liberty in translating the novel to the big screen. Don't jumble it up leaving everyone disappointed.
So if Twilight was some artsy exercise in portraying an erratic dream sequence onto the big screen, then I gleefully will have to admit I didn't get it. But as it stands, it looks more like exactly that: an exercise. An exercise by a film student in his or her first year, where they weren't taught yet how to link scenes together. I am happy New Moon got a new director. Maybe he'll be able to figure out how to adjust a book to the big screen and still have it make sense to everyone, including, for instance, poor boyfriends that got dragged along to the theater but never read the book. I might deep down still not be happy that it's not quite exactly like the novel, but at least it will make sense.