Awful Direction

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2008)

First things first, a little history before I begin my rant.. I've read all the Twilight novels including the partially finished Midnight Sun, and for the most part, enjoyed reading them, especially the first book on which the movie is based.
Although I'm not one of those die-hard fans of the series, I did, however, enjoy the book for what it was. A touching vampire love story which was written primarily for the teen community. And even though I am nearing 30 myself, I liked the book.
As for the movie, even though I feel that for movies that are based on books, the book version is almost always better, I went to watch the movie with an open mind. I understand that as a screen adaptation, there had to be some deviations from the book itself, and that was fine with me. But seriously, the script was bad.
The main draw of the book was the attraction and love between the two main characters, but in the movie, their love towards each other was never expressed properly. One moment you see Edward covering his nose as Bella walks in, and the next moment, apparently he's in love? Some of the dialogue too, seemed a little abrupt and pointless at times. You'd think they might have thought to cut out those useless dialogue and take the time to develop the love between Edward and Bella instead.
Special effects were hilarious and make-up was a joke as well. I mean, would it have hurt to increase the budget a bit more so that the jumping scenes (or flying as looked like to me) didn't look so amateurish?
And then there was the whole thing with Edward in the sunlight. In the book, he's supposed to sparkle "like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface" and be "glittering like crystal", but unfortunately in the movie, it just looked like they threw on some glitter that they got from the craft store.
He could have walked out into the busiest street on the most cloudless and sunniest day of year and nobody would have noticed him "sparkling". Then again, maybe they blew the whole budget buying up pots of pasty makeup for the vampires. Even then, they seemed to have scrimped on that as well since they failed to apply it to the back of the vampires' necks.
As a whole, I feel that the casting was pretty good. Kristen Stewart was believable as Bella and Robert Pattinson did his best with the terrible script. However, certain scenes were almost too painful to watch with the very awkward acting. This, I really believe was not the fault of the actors, who did the best they could, but rather the horrible direction they were given.
Which brings me to my main gripe about the movie, and the main reason why I took the time to write my very first comment on IMDb. Catherine Hardwicke.
Catherine Hardwicke is a joke as a director and one wonders what was in the minds of those involved to actually cast her as the director. Her direction was appalling and non-existent at times.
It was a movie that had the potential to be a great love story, but she took it and sadly massacred it. The bad screenplay helped as well, but ultimately it was Catherine Hardwicke and her awful direction that was the movie's downfall, in the end leaving us wondering just what could have been.
In a nutshell, the movie adaptation of the book Twilight had the potential of being a good movie but ultimately was sabotaged by a bad script and a lousy director.