Sam Saw: Twilight

Twilight is the story of blossoming love between Bella Swan, the new girl at a rural high school, and Edward Cullen a handsome yet reserved vampire. For better or worse, on Saturday afternoon, I sat down in an incredibly crowded theater to watch Twilight. Hit the link for my review.



Twilight is on the hardest kind of movies to review: a movie that isn't made for you. That being said, I'm going to do my best to be fair.

The first thing you'll notice when Twilight begins, is that it uses a lot of narration through the voice of the main character Bella. Narration is useful in films when you have a lot of background information to get across in a very short amount of time. Twilight's narration in the opening sequence as well as narration throughout the film don't give us any extra information we don't come across throughout the natural course of the story and furthermore are poorly delivered. It may sound like nitpicking, but I found the narration extremely off putting and distracting. At times it was so bad that everyone in the theater was laughing out loud.

Okay, enough of the bashing. On to the positive. Twilight is essentially a teen romance made for pre-teen girls. The vampire theme is really nothing more of an add on and could really be removed without much of an effect on the overall story. Twilight is a movie about two teens falling in love, yet still trying to resist their carnal urges (in this case the urge to drink blood, but go ahead and replace drink blood with sex for all intensive purposes). The fact that some of the main characters are vampires is icing. Vampires are cool now, so the male lead is a vampire; he could just as well be the popular quarterback.

When you strip away all the garnish, what you have is a surprisingly realistic portrayal of high school love. Awkwardness, uncertainty, jealousy, lust, embarrassment, the one step forward two steps back mentality, all these aspects of first love come across through the actions of Bella and Edward. You really believe that these characters are struggling through falling in love for the first time.

Another aspect of the film I really enjoyed, was it's portrayal of high school. Movies tend to use the same archetype of high school; There are jocks, cheerleaders, the nerds (kids who like theater, the school paper etc) and then the kids who fall somewhere in the middle, and of course they all hate each other. I don't know about you, but I didn't go to that high school, and neither do the kids in Twilight. It was nice to see an different type of high school where the football players can be friends with the editor of the school paper. I'm not saying that the typical movie high school doesn't exist, just that there are other types of schools out there and it's nice to see them in films every once in a while.

The last thing I'd like to talk about was the action. Watch a trailer for Twilight and you might think there's a plethora of good old vamp on vamp fighting. This is a trick. Twilight is trying to to convince the guys to come with their girlfriends. In truth, there is about 3 minutes of fighting. Seriously, they didn't even have enough for a full trailer. Amidst the action in the trailer if you look close, some of the clips are actually from a scene where the characters are playing baseball. But really, none of this matters. Twilight isn't an action film. It's a teen romance, and an emotionally realistic and compelling one. When you look at what this movie is supposed to be and how it turned out, it's hard to say that it's anything but a resounding success.

A