Twilight is a roof in need of thatching, but the cast manages to keep dry.

Rating: 7/10 (2 December 2008)

Twilight was one of those rare movies I went into with no preconceived notions and only what the trailer offered for background information. Maybe that fact made it a more accessible movie for me than others. As I watch any movie I always try to bear in mind the questions (especially if it is a film adaptation of a book): Who is this movie speaking to and who is it being made for? Like many good movies with rabid devotees Twilight was targeting a certain demographic...for the most part young adult females and teenage females. After I had processed this I started to look for things that the movie brought to this target audience that they were not expecting and benefited from. For the most part, Twilight seemed to deliver on all the main issues dealt with in the book, with the obvious emphasis on the forbidden love aspect to the relationship between Edward and Bella. What I felt made the movie a convincing love story was that the main actors (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) managed to nuance their characters and move them away from lustful teenagers in a strange relationship into people exploring something forbidden with an obsessive desire. Kristen Stewart makes a hard to believe character believable in Bella, and Robert Pattinson adds a humanity to the character Edward that makes him relatable rather than the static one dimensional vampire he could have been. The one issue I had with the movie that I ultimately forgave was the pacing. It wasn't hard to believe that Edward and Bella were in love, it was just that the pacing of the movie was such that the audience never could fully understand how far along their relationship was. The most obvious example of this for me was towards the end in the hospital when we are to believe (for all of 8 seconds) that Bella will move to Jacksonville. I was under the impression at that point that there would be some touching interaction between Edward and Bella that would reveal what happened did not change her feelings for Edward, but what followed was an over too quickly dialog about how Edward shouldn't suggest things like that. At that point I decided that the pacing of the movie had obscured my sense of how far along I was supposed to believe their relationship was. When a movie is relatively low budget like Twilight (compared with other big screen adaptations of books) there is more pressure on the actors to deliver convincing performances, and any of this films faults were not as a result of poor acting, but rather a too brisk pacing leading the audience to sometimes fill in the blanks and suspend disbelief even more.