Edward, a vampire, falls in love with Bella, a human girl in the small town of Forks, Washinton.

Rating: 7/10 (24 November 2008)

I'm going to start out by saying that i'm a huge fan of the Twilight series. I love the books and I'm very attached to Edward and Bella and their love story.
I sat in line for tickets on premier night, and honestly my expectations weren't that high. The previews made the movie look cheesy and low budget.
I've watched the movie twice and I liked it better the second time. There are good points and there are bad points. I'm going to start with the good:
The directing for this movie was beautiful. The film is filled with scenes of forests and and greenery. It made me want to go to Washington state. The film opens with a deer grazing with Stewart narrating in the background.
The casting for this movie was amazing. The characters, especially the vampires, are almost exactly like I pictured them. Alice looks like a pixie, Rosalie looks beautiful , Emmett is comparable to a bear, Carlisle is attractive, and Victoria and James look savage and evil. I've heard a lot of people complain that Robert Pattinson wasn't good for Edward, saying mostly that he wasn't attractive enough. Almost every line in the book is infused with Bella obsessing over how amazingly beautiful he is. That's a hard thing for an actor to live up to. Not everyone is going to be happy, no matter how attractive the actor looks like. Kristin Stewart portrays all of the awkwardness that Bella entails.
Another amazing aspect of the film is the soundtrack. The music, especially, Bella's lullaby is beautiful and fit the movie very well. One of my favorite songs of all time is super massive black holes and I was thrilled to hear it in the baseball scene.
Also, the movie did an excellent job following the book. I'm an avid reader and i've had many of the books I've read have been turned into movies. One thing that I've learned is to never expect a book and movie to be the exact same. Having said this, there were direct lines from the book in the movie. One thing that I would have liked to see expanded was the meadow scene. Also, one thing that I thought that the director and probably the writers failed to do was to show the depth and evolution of Bella'a love for Edward. It was as if it just happened. There was no development.
There was decent amounts of humor in the scene, mostly in the interactions of Bella and Charlie (I did laugh in parts that weren't supposed to, if from nothing else than pure cheesiness). The interaction, especially in Charlie's part was probably some of the best acting in the entire movie, which leads me into the not so good parts of the film.
Charlie was supposed to be a minor character yet i think that he was one of the best actors in the film, as were the other minor actors. Alice did a wonderful job being a graceful pixie and Rosalie was excellent at portraying her hatred for Bella. James was creepy and Jasper looked like he was in constant pain, as he should be.
The place were I have the real problem is with Pattinson (Edward) and Stewart (Bella). In the very beginning, with the scene in the biology lab, Pattinson's acting made me want to bang my head into a wall. I understand that he was trying to mask Bella's smell, but it look more like he was having a seizure. His accent was awful at first, but it got better as the movie went on, as did his acting abilities. His makeup also improved. There was way too much in the beginning. The chemistry between Pattinson and Stewart was undeniable but i'm not sure if that was enough. Stewart had decent line delivery but her expression between lines was awkward and exaggerated. On some of the parts were it was bad (maybe horrible?) acting, its hard to decide if it was poor line delivery, or poor lines to deliver. This can be seen in the scene when Bella first says out loud that she thinks Edward is a vampire. It would take excellent actors and actresses to perform those lines well and Pattinson and Stewart just didn't seem to have the stuff. I suppose I'm only trying to point out the faults of the script. I would never call Pattinson and Stewart bad at what they do. I just think that they could have used a few more takes.
I think the worst scene on Stewart's part would be when she was bitten by James and was 'trying' to be in pain. on Pattinson's part, I would say pretty much most of the bio scene was painful to watch.
Another thing about the film that bugged me was the lack of sparkle. When Edward stepped into the sun, I had to point out to my friends that he was sparkling.
The scene in which Edward and Billy black were driving by each other was stupid and cheesy.
All in all, the movie was far from a crash and burn. It's not something that would be a favorite for me, but neither would I condemn it as a failure. I would recommend it only because I think everyone reacts differently to it and that its something that everyone should formulate their own opinion on.