A benign menagerie of disjointed dialog and lore-less adaption.

Rating: 4/10 (5 December 2008)

Each generation seems to take liberties with the past in order to modify or enhance something that came into existence or to prominence before even they did. As a result, we've watched baseball digress into a sport riddled with cheating, popcorn move from the stove-top to the microwave and now rap and hip-hop turned into the formulaic garbage coming out of New Orleans in the form of Lil' Boosie and Lil' Wayne. But nothing has stoked my ire more than what has happened to our beloved Dracula during the four decades of my life.
Dracula was a mysterious, dark figure, with brooding eyes and a penchant for seduction. Dracula was, in part, a recluse who understood all too well that he would not be understood. Dracula was refined, debonair, intelligent and manipulative. He channeled his longing for love into a lust for the blood of those who would deny him happiness. And while these aspects of the lore of Dracula and vampires were aptly crafted in movies such as Nosferatu and Brahm Stoker's Dracula, what we have been given today with Twilight is something virtually inexplicable by comparison.
Twilight gives us a vampire that sparkles in the light like a blinged-out Russell Simmons pendant--a vampire who, instead of creating lust for himself through manipulation and clever social engineering, succumbs to basic living instincts of lust, love and adolescent clinginess.
The main character in Twilight, Edward Cullen, is a love struck stalker. Moreover, his ridiculous body language, disjointed dialog and unfaithful incarnations of vampire lore are pathetic at best. He gets almost every aspect of the character wrong, and it isn't all his fault. The bulk of the blame goes to Stephenie Meyer. Her version of a vampire was marketed in Meyer's books toward teen girls. The ease of reading the books underscores the frantic pace at which people devoured each installment. Nonetheless, the formulaic approach toward spring-boarding the paltry story forward serves to undermine the development of what should have been a genuinely interesting vampire character. This one, in Twilight, is just plain bad. Dracula would eat this guy for lunch...literally.
For those of you reading this and rolling your eyes, please take a moment to rent Brahm Stoker's Dracula, and witness what a talented director (Francis Ford Coppola), lead (Gary Oldman) and supporting actor (Keanu Reeves) can do with Mr. Stoker's creation. I can assure you that if you have a discerning eye and a fascination with vampire lore that you will see the differences immediately and will know that in Twilight all that sparkling you got was just rhinestones and not diamonds.