Review of Twilight (2008)

Twilight is the creative progeny of Stephanie Meyer. Embraced by teenage girls worldwide who clearly have no abilities whatsoever at discerning crap literature; it has received cult-like adoration by poorly-read cretins who clearly have not experienced the clearly superior teenage fiction from the likes of Rowling and Coupland. Twilight is a veritable stink-bomb of a book, with 75% of it being 'OMGZ, EDWARD CULLEN IS SO FITTTT' with the remaining 25% being painfully dull discourse and action scenes as flimsy as cardboard that has been left out overnight in a tropical storm. It doesn't help that the main characters are vacuous, pasty-faced morons. I'm looking at you, Bella.

'What's that poking me in the back?'

The plot is not especially spectacular. Boy meets girl. Girl finds out boy is a vampire using the infinite powers of Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia. Girl almost gets eaten by other vampires. Boy saves girl. Film ends with boy and girl enjoying a nice long smooch. Yawn.

It would be unfair to complain that Twilight is not faithful to the book. No director in his (or her) right mind would want to be faithful to that steaming pile of horse manure. I do have to question the casting choices though. When Stephanie Mayer wrote Twilight, she placed so much effort in describing the aesthetic qualities of Edward and Bella, it almost felt as if it was The Hills with superpowers and an unhealthy blood fetish. In contrast, Robert Pattinson looks like a ghost-like Alistar Darling. Kirstin Stewart doesn't especially live up to the standards created by Meyer's theasaurus-abusing either.

One of the problems with Twilight is that it touches on so many themes and genres, it isn't actually sure what it is. It is a foaming-at-the-mouth schizophrenic of a film. It tries to be a horror, romance, comedy, teen and action film, but ultimately ends up being weak in all of them. The dialogue between Bella and Edward is at best awkward and at worst cringe-worthy. The action scenes are short and predictable. Everything feels poorly done.

The Twilight cast. They work hard. They play hard.

Edward's character often feels like reading a fifteen year old girl's LiveJournal blog. He comes out with lines so corny they might as well have been read while standing in a field of maize. One in particular stands out as especially bad. When told that he cannot change classes from being with Bella, he pulls his signature move and storms out whilst ominously muttering 'I'll just have to endure'. Pattinson tries to portray Edward as a tortured soul, but his lack of acting experience (and the weak writing) lets him down, as he just ends up looking like an petty, angsty teenager who has been barred from entering Hot Topic for life. Liam Neeson and Robert De Niro he ain't.

I've been particularly harsh with regards to Twilight, and to be fair, it's not all bad. It's the kind of film I could enjoy after having a particularly heavy anvil dropped on my head. Unfortunately, weak casting, awful scripting, sequential clichés and piss poor acting let it down, as if it could be let down any more. This has to be one of the most god-awful films I have ever seen. In comparison, this bare faced insult to cinema makes The Phantom Menace look like Oscar quality material. Avoid like an STD.