Twilight

The Mormon allegory about resisting sexual impulses finally reaches the big screen with Twilight. This is, of course, the film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s teen sensation novel and should be the first of about four in the series. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, this bit of cornball vampire-romance schlock is the buzz of the preteen-to-teen set and the talk of everyone who hasn’t seen another vampire movie or read another vampire book, like, ever.

Kristen Stewart stars as Bella, perhaps one of the most annoying protagonists put to film in 2008. She’s a dreary, gawky, breathy teen with no personality and nothing to latch on to from a cinematic perspective. Bella moves to Forks, which according to Meyer’s book is an incredible rainy locale, and lives with her father on the rugged Washington coast. She heads to a new school, where apparently every student has read her bio before her arrival, and makes friends easily despite having no discernible social skills and no actual likeable qualities.

Eventually Bella discovers the one and only Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in biology class. She is drawn to him instantly, as he is to her. Their breathless exchanges, their constant blinking and biting of lips, and their mumbled phrases abruptly blossom into a romance for the ages. One catch, of course, is that Edward is a vampire desperately trying to resist his “thirst” for Bella. Bella, however, seems to have no problem putting Edward through absolute hell if it means she can be with him.

We meet Edward’s family, a strange crew of pale-faced nobodies, and a plot develops in which another vampire thirsts after Bella. Edward and his family only consume animal blood, thus making them vegetarians. Go figure. With Edward and Co. resisting the blood of Bella, they find time to play baseball and hang out with her. They take to her right away, just like Edward did, and soon enough they’re risking it all to protect her from vampires who do nosh on human blood.

Twilight carries on a basic idea of denial in that the “good” vampires manage to rebuff their instinctive longing for blood and apparently never take human blood no matter how burly the impulses are. No matter how much heavy breathing Bella does, no matter how much she bites her lip, and no matter how much she mumbles over her words in that mouth-watering adolescent way, Edward doesn’t dare move from his staunch place of abstemiousness.

As a film, Twilight is terrible. The performances are awful from top to bottom, with negligible flashes of real personality and life from the characters. Performers mumble, stumble, and stagger around the screen in trying to introduce us to these characters, but nothing really takes hold and the end results are colourless and ripe for Airplane!-style satire. Stewart inhabits Bella with such breathiness, such irritation, and such idiocy that one has trouble feeling any concern for her character at all. After all, why would we?

Pattinson might look the part, I suppose, as Edward, but he sure as hell does little to act the part. His is the most unexciting vampire of all time, I daresay. Part of this is Meyer’s fault, sure, as Pattinson can’t help the ridiculousness of “getting all shiny” when the sun comes out or the daft logistics of sucking the blood out of a deer. Pattinson’s leering, gloomy, mind-numbing performance does little to drum up interest in the character beyond the phony morons of the eighth grade.

But enough is enough. Let’s set aside the pitiable constitution of the motion picture for a moment. Let’s ignore that the movie manages to leave its established first person set-up to explore a pair of scenes that we really don’t need to see. Let’s pretend we never saw Bella shake a squeezable ketchup bottle. Let’s imagine that the soundtrack wasn’t a sweltering turd of tacky music set at the worst conceivable times. Let’s imagine the movie had even one segment with some humour or wit. And let’s pretend that the closing credits weren’t among the most ostentatious and garish of all time.

What we’re left with are the bones of a piss-poor vampire movie that attempts to teach us a lesson about self-abnegation. It’s about negating desires, about resisting life, about abstaining from impulses. This may or may not be a laudable message, depending on where your morality lies. But one thing Twilight and Stephanie Meyer’s complete bleak, cowardly, decomposing empire is is a spineless and brainless excuse for literature. And it’s a howling shame that this preposterous excuse for literature became a boring and dire excuse for a film.

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