FilmJudge - Twilight

REVIEW

Twilight
2008
Certificate: 12 | Runtime: 122 | Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke

Bella Swan (Stewart) has just moved to the seemingly drab down of Forks in Washington state to live with her father Charlie (Burke). Her mother is on the road with her new husband as he looks for work, but the two still keep in touch. Bella struggles to fit in at school, though soon makes some friends including Angela (Christian Serratos) and Jessica (Anna Kendrick). But it is Edward Cullen (Pattinson) who fascinates her, not least because he seems to find her repellant. However, Bella soon finds out that Edward is a member of a family of vampires, and that he is actually intoxicated by her. They try to become an item, but Forks is under threat by another clan of vampires - who now have Bella in their sights.

As I walked into the auditorium this morning to watch Twilight, I looked up and examined the audience members I would be joining. Nearly every single one of them was a teenage girl, a teenage girl's mother, or a teenage girl's grandmother. There was one other bloke in there, but he was obviously the boyfriend of one of the teenage girls. Therefore, I accept that Twilight is not a film geared towards somebody like me, though I still have every right to see it and pass comment. And that comment is simply this; I don't see what all the fuss is about.

I had been led to believe by Twilight's detractors that it was quite possibly the worst film ever made. This is not true, in fact it is very far from the truth indeed. Neither however, is it a particularly good film, despite the protestations of its fans that it's the best film ever. It's average; it has some good things and some bad things, but mostly it's somewhere in the middle. And now, finally, I can get to the specifics. I'll begin with how the film looks. Cheap, is the answer to that question. There is nothing here to distinguish Twilight from, say, an episode of Buffy. The whole thing is shot through a fairly ridiculous range of blue filters, and boasts special effects that aren't so much bad as they are lazy. Mostly utilised when the vampires are seen to move around very quickly, the effects are spectacular in their mere adequacy. And Carter Burwell's musical score is as repetitive as it is bland; there's no wonder or drama to it.

Considering that Twilight is about vampires in high school, it might seem strange for me to suggest that the film has a familiar plot; but in many ways it does. It touches on all the issues common to teenage dramas about acceptance, young romance and growing up; it just does it with vampirism impacting on some of them. The whole vampire clan warfare thing is in many ways a distraction. The quality of the cast also varies. Stewart has come a certain distance as a young actress. She exhibits more range here, breathing a sense of vulnerability into Bella. And while she retains a certain aloofness her Bella isn't unlikeable or unpleasant. Pattison mostly acts with his eyebrows, but he does at least have a certain amount of presence and the right look for the role. He and Stewart actually enjoy an oddly charged sort of chemistry. Burke is a welcome face as Chris; a nice guy in a tricky familial situation. Both Serratos and Kendrick have their moments but are playing underdeveloped characters, and few of the other actors register sufficiently to warrant a mention.

I found Twilight to be stuck somewhere in the middle of being two very different types of film. I felt a desire from it to be epic in some way; either in terms of the complicated and arguably doomed romance, or in the world of vampires and magic it wanted to construct. And at the same time, there's a typical and rather intimate high school drama going on in the background. There's a sort of constant tension in the film between these two elements, and the result is that it doesn't work particularly well either way.

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