whoever you are, girl or boy, man or woman, Twilight is shoddy, pretentious film-making

Rating: 2/10 (25 July 2009)

Look, whoever-you-are-readers, I'm not a teenage girl. I'm a 20-something gent who just likes watching movies, usually good ones. I can also go for the occasional really stupid/fun bad movie or incredible guilty pleasure. With Twilight, I knew it was, according to what I heard and read and seen about it, *meant* for teenage girls, I suppose, since it's one of those super dated and tried-and-whatever stories of a girl falling for a guy she's not supposed to and bad stuff happens - only with vampires. I can't speak for anyone except myself in saying it simply stating that it's not a good movie. Period.
And it's not just about the treatment of vampires. Sure, there's that. Sure there is the facet of these being diluted and watered down so-called vampires to the point of being nothing but mockable. But it's simply a story that on its own terms is not told well. It's shot through the filter of whiter-blue-shade-of-pale, where the intent, I guess, is to make Washington state (specifically the town of Fork) look like this all the time.
The director, Catherine Hardwicke, has directed some decent films before, such as 2003's Thirteen. But here she tackles the material without any subtlety. The cast, featuring sometimes very-good-actors Kristen Stewart and (yes) Robert Pattinson, seem to be in the kind of "method* subtlety that comes with that caveat of years of the James Dean in-breeding school of acting. Her camera people roam around without, usually, any sense of placement for the sake of the story, and, well, the story itself reeks of stupidity and consequence in the most mind-boggling of happenstances.
Perhaps there could have been at least a semi-interesting or compelling story here, with an out-of-town girl in a new town meeting a young mysterious man at her high school and falling in love and finding he's a vampire and still being really turned on by it and yada yada bad things happen. Or maybe I'm wishing impossible things. Coming from a book by Stephenie Meyer that is more Harlequin romance than vampire lore, it's central problem is giving us characters not only not likable, but without personality. Say what you will about the corny aspects of Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it had characters and story lines that actually meant things, with personalities and humor and real drama that could be affecting. In Twilight the coldness of the environment is reflected quadruple-fold in the characters and story, and the film-making, shoddy as it is, probably reflects that attitude of the book.
Oh, and of course, it's corny poppycock a lot of the time, but again it shouldn't have been a problem. I might have even laughed out loud, for all the wrong reasons, at one of the most unintentionally funny scenes of the decade with the vampire baseball scene (yes, it's as ludicrous and bang-your-head-against-the-wall-till-you-bleed without any point for the story save for a West Side Story stand-off). But aside from its abstinence-only allegory (and believe you me, this is the antithesis of 2008's Teeth), there's nothing here a viewer can take away of worth. Nada. Zilch. There's nothing interesting in the romance because the characters are either boring miscreants, befuddled side characters like Bella's father, or 1/2 dimensional drones like that "bad" vampire in the mirrors climax.
And finally, nothing to add significantly to vampire lore, save for its pop culture phenomena. Maybe I'm missing something the teen girls are seeing, maybe there's something oh-so dreamy about that pretentious navel gazer Edward. But a duck is a duck, and Twilight is an overwrought, meddling piece of a twaddle-corpse movie.