Not being a teenage girl, Twilight didn’t do a hell of a lot for me. My experience with Romance Novels involved a handful of old Harlequins and a bit of free time. It was not time well spent. I understand that newer romance novels have lots of sex and a bit of action, but Twilight is a lot more of the Old Style Romance novel.
In short, not a lot happens in Twilight. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen virtually every bit of action in Twilight. I have not read the book, but it is on my list to read one of these days. There are a ton of characters in Twilight, more than can have active roles in a two hour movie. So we have at least ten characters that must have been important in the book, so they get to make walk-ons in the film.
Twilight is about a group of Nice Vampires that live in a small town in the Pacific North West. Three Not Nice Vampires visit the town and start killing people, which makes life a bit difficult for the family of Nice Vampires. The Nice Vampires are named Collins-as in Barnabas Collins-the vampire from Dark Shadows. Ok, it was Cullens and not Collins, but that’s close enough for me. Well, the author did say she cranked this puppy out in three months, so we can forgive her for a certain lack of imagination here and everywhere else.
But mainly it is a love story, about a girl who loves a vampire and wants to be a vampire herself so she can be with him, like, forever. Twilight’s vampires drink blood, but that is the only similarity they have with any other vampire you are likely to have ever seen or heard of. These guys stay out of the sun because it makes them go all sparkly, not because it will kill them. They have all the powers and none of the weaknesses of standard issue vampires. If our world had these blood suckers walking around, people would be kept in pens as livestock and vamps would run the world.
The girl who loves the vampire smells really, really good-and so the vampires want her. Well, they want to eat her-but being Nice Vampires they just don’t do things like that. The Bad Vamps, well, they have no such scruples and that is where Twilight finds its tiny bit of action.
The casting is a bit baffling, as the girl isn’t all that beautiful and the guy looks like a consist loser in the Golden Gloves. His flattened nose and bizarre hairdo don’t exactly turn him into a young Brad Pitt or Robert Redford. Must be that Vamp Magic that makes him so hot. Twilight is filled with unattractive people shot in tight close ups-which are often a bit shocking on the big screen. The long and lingering shots of the Great White North are very pretty and help pad the film out in the many spots where there is nothing going on in the story.
Again, not a teenage girl, so my opinion here doesn’t really count. But if your not a teenage girl, don’t bother going to see Twilight. Pop in that tape of Dark Shadows instead.
