Disappointed Despite My Very Low Expectations

Rating: 2/10 (8 December 2008)

It's to be expected that when a novel is adapted onto film, you can bet that it will loosely follow the original story-line... with "Hollywood" twists added to it for marketability. Going into the theater I really had a very open mind and was hoping to enjoy the movie, even with my low expectations.
I'll admit I'm not the target audience of Stephanie Meyer's novels. I'm 26 years old and have long out-grown my days of shrieking over teen idols (I got that all out of my system when I was screaming over Leo DiCaprio back in the day). Regardless of some of the immature drama and obvious typos/English/grammar errors, I still enjoyed reading the Twilight series. Something about the forbidden love between Bella and Edward really sucked me in and I continued reading their journey all the way through.
Despite my mindset, I feel that Twilight falls completely flat on it's face leaving much to be desired. I've only been to 2 movies in my life where people have walked out of theater mid-way through... and Twilight is one of those movies. Twilight is also one of the worst movie's I've ever seen... sparring toe-to-toe with Jumper in terms of being the worst. How do I even start?? Some of the people who have written praising reviews of Twilight have mentioned that reading the book helps you appreciate the movie. Even though this is an adaptation of a popular novel, I feel that it shouldn't be a necessity for someone to read the book before hand in order to understand and enjoy the movie. It's imperative that the movie can draw in a broad audience and doesn't just pander to Twilight fans (which it obviously did).
As I watched the movie, I kept thinking... if I had not read the books, I'd have NO IDEA what was going on. The screen writing was absolutely terrible. You can't just take some literal word for word quotes from the book and expect that to clue in the audience. In one scene Bella and Edward completely despise each other and in the next they're professing their love to one another. So much for character development and the gradual momentum of their relationship. Let's go from 0 - 60 in 3 seconds! Catherine Hardwicke's vision for this film also comes short. She attempted to make Twilight into an artsy film when that's just not the right direction for it. The camera angles... if the movie was in high definition we'd probably be spending most of the time looking at how much lipstick Robert Pattinson was wearing. In other words, she used too many close shots to portray emotional depth. Special effects were particularly ghetto. The only scene with effects that I did like was the baseball scene.
The one aspect of the film that really did me in was the mediocre acting. Somehow I felt like this movie was dedicated to showcasing how handsome Robert Pattinson looked. I did like Kristen Stewart's performance in Into the Wild. However, her portrayal of Bella was one of angst and coldness as opposed to being fragile and shy. The whole time Bella acted like a completely beeotch, which was aggravating. Robert Pattinson focused too much on the tortured aspect of Edward's personality rather than his refinement, intelligence and charming nature. Whether I can completely fault them for portraying the lead characters this way is questionable... they could have possibly been following Catherine's direction. The bright spot was Billy Burke as Charlie. His acting really stood out and I'm glad he was casted.
Overall I don't see myself even renting the movie when it comes out on DVD. Hopefully with the making of New Moon, they will make a number of necessary changes so that it will become a more higher quality movie. I won't hold my breathe though... I'll just see who they chose to replace Catherine Hardwicke.