Wow! Was this slow and boring!

Rating: 4/10 (22 November 2008)

I bought this book on a whim this summer for my daughter and for my wife. They loved it. My daughter says it's the best book she ever read. So, being pleased that I actually purchased something for the ladies that they liked I decided I'd keep being a hero and surprise them with tickets to this on the opening weekend. '
I'm not their hero anymore.
I got to the theater early as we all wanted to sit together and we were expecting crowds (not as big as we thought), but my son (age 9) and I got seats while my wife and daughter (age 11) got popcorn. I was a little uncomfortable as we sat in the theater before the movie started with the noisiest bunch of women this side of a Beatles' concert.
I was excited, but I was also realistic. This didn't need to be "Casablanca" to make me happy. Just give me a 7 star flick.
At some point I started hoping their would be a scene with enough light in it for me to check my watch. At another point my son whispered to me, "Dad, this is a HORRIBLE movie." I never knew the fellow to not like anything (other than church).
First of all the two glaringly bad things. The make-up made "The Munsters" look subtle. The special effects looked like they were done by a middle school video club.
The plot was very slow and their was no conflict for the first 90 minutes. We got Bella sitting around talking to this unrealistically nice friends (One boy didn't realize he was gay, but maybe that comes up in a later book). Her worst problem seems to be that she has two great parents and every boy in the town wants to take her to the prom. We do have a 4-second action scene. Bella discovers almost nothing for herself. She does go to the book store and check out a book, but then hardly uses it and instead goes on the Internet and finds out that Edward is a vampire.
Still, after that he just tells her everything about being an umpire (uhhhh, no that's a different scene)...vampire. The Vampires, I understand, are supposed to be incredibly good looking, but they're not up to speed in those regards (except for about four of them).
There is an incredibly stupid baseball scene where they actually wear baseball uniforms which just comes across as absurd (and why, if they want to protect Bella so much, would they take her out during a thunderstorm?).
After waiting forever for some conflict to happen, it finally does, and is over in about 5 minutes.
It also seemed that Edward was attracted to Bella because he wanted to eat her worse than other humans. Huh? I mean I really wanted to eat my candy in the theater but I wasn't really attracted to it in that way.
The ending of the movie seemed to just be tacked on.
I was fascinated by the other Vampires (both good and bad), but learned nothing about them, except that one of the "good" vampires was grumpy about Edward dating Bella. I was also fascinated with the "Native Americans," but we only got a couple of none-to-subtle hints about what they were.
The thing is, I felt like this movie made the mistake of telling me what was happening instead of showing me what was happening. No matter how good a book is, a movie has to be a movie, and this was mostly just a lot of talking.
My daughter was depressed the rest of the day as she had been so excited to see this. My wife said, she could have taken it being slow, but that the make-up ruined it for her. My son was just ready for some buffalo wings and refused to talk about the movie at all.
Still, the scenery was beautiful when they got in the woods, and this only increased my appetite for a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail.
All in all, I'll take almost any episode of "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer" over this.