Oh, boy! Another horrendous franchise in the making!...

Rating: 5/10 (27 August 2009)

Do please color me bemused and uninterested. "Twilight," adapted (from the first volume of an immensely popular series of fantasy romance novels aimed at tween- and teenaged girls) by Melissa "Dexter" Rosenberg, a dance major turned writer/producer, and directed by Catherine "Thirteen" Hardwicke, was a remarkably successful seat-filler last year ($190mil+ on a budget of $35mil+) that's about as bloodless and fangless as the "vegetarian" vampire our self-involved little heroine falls for. I realize I'm not a member of the film's target audience, but there it was at my local library, free as free can be, so I thought I'd give it a shot and see what all the lucrative fuss was about.
Not much.
As a romance, "Twilight" is tepid at best. Other than staring at each other with a variety of expressions that range from constipated to toothlessly suggestive, the leads have no apparent chemistry (and this despite their apparent off-screen relationship). Their motivations are an amorphous murk. Other than his James Dean-ish good looks and funky eyeballs, what is it she sees in this icy-cold oaf? Did she really enjoy kissing refrigerated lips? And why is this inhuman Dorian Grey so taken with a simpleton teenager? What, simply because he can't read her mind? I suppose this is all silliness that only a teenaged girl can understand; I sure don't. Give me Romeo and Juliet any day; heck, if you want vampire romance, give me "Near Dark" or "Once Bitten," or even "Fright Night." Beyond that, Kristen "Panic Room" Stewart is still an appealing young actress, and I'll watch about anything she's in, even if she hasn't refined her ability to choose prime roles yet. I can't say the same for Robert "Harry Potter..." Pattinson, who left me as cold as his ostensible character; right now he's one of those actors who makes you think, "The lights are on, but nobody's home." The production values were fine, Eliot "Vamp" Davis' camera-wrangling was good, if at times a bit too music video-ish, the art direction and so on and so forth, all good for a multi-million dollar picture, but in the end...? In the end, it's all for nothing, because the story is tedious drivel, most of the characters cardboard cut-outs, the entire conceptual framework unconvincing (sparkly vampires that run around during the day?)...in an oft-repeated phrase of mine: think Sturgeon's Revelation. "Twilight" is junk food disguised with an artful salad, empty calories that provide no nourishment whatsoever.
I can only imagine what deviant impulses have led the older males on this site to rate this thing higher than their younger cohorts (unsurprisingly, the females are just the opposite). Edit: this has now changed, presumably due to video distribution; interesting.
You can bet I'll be avoiding the inevitable sequel(s), and unless you're an adolescent female, I'm betting you will be, too.