![twilight-poster1[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/twilight-poster11-213x300.jpg "twilight-poster1[1]")
We liked the books, so we couldn’t resist checking out the movie…
Rating: 3/5
I really wanted to like this more; I’d heard from a couple of people that the movie was very good — even better than the book.
It isn’t.
There are a lot of ways movies can get off track when trying to carry forward the core identity of a novel onto the screen:
- The actors don’t act like the characters in the book (this is not always “bad acting” — it’s more often bad screenwriting or bad direction, in my opinion).
- The actors don’t look like the characters in the book. This is often subjective, but if the character is specified to look a certain way and he or she doesn’t, there’s cognitive dissonance.
- They leave out critical scenes. Even the gold standard of book-to-film conversions, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, had to cut stuff out. But you can’t cut out parts that are critical to character development or central to the plot, particularly if you then fall into the next problem…
- They change scenes into unrecognizability or simply add new scenes out of whole cloth. Sometimes you have to change scenes so they’re filmable, but there’s no excuse for just jamming new, unrelated material into the film, particularly when the original scene from the novel would have worked better.
- The special effects don’t live up to the imagery from the book.
Unfortunately, the movie adaptation of Twilight falls into most of these traps. Although most of the characters act appropriately most of the time, the main character of Bella (Kristen Stewart) never cheers up, never cracks more than one or two smiles in the whole film, which seems strongly at odds with her behavior in the latter half of the novel. Of course, much of those scenes were cut in favor of more action.
In terms of appearance, I thought the characters were generally well-cast. But when many of the characters are supposed to be supernaturally attractive, having them played by human actors and actresses with little in the way of augmenting special effects leaves them a bit short of the mark. Rosalie (Nikki Reed), for example, is supposed to be the most gorgeous person in the world. She’s pretty, but not in any kind of jaw-dropping sense, particularly as she appears in the movie.
As far as the choice of scenes goes, Twilight hits most of the high points, but the novel takes the main focus of the book, the investigation and pursuit of the mystery of Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) nature, and pushes it down in importance, instead trying to punch up the action levels by inserting gratuitous murders that were not in the novel. As a result, the filmmakers had to construct cheap visual shortcuts out of whole cloth to use in substitute for characterization. Examples include: Bella’s dad cocking a shotgun before opening the door to meet Edward for the first time, and Rosalie’s bowl-smashing scene at the Cullen residence.
I really wanted to like this movie and I have to say that it wasn’t all bad, or even mostly bad. For all its faults, it did capture the essence of the book, and I thought that the relationship between Bella and Edward (the core of the whole series) was reasonably believable, if not fully developed.
I’m honestly not sure whether I should recommend this movie if you’re a Twilight book series fan or not. Robin didn’t like it and doesn’t plan to see the others (which means I won’t either…); I’m on the fence. I guess if seeing movie adaptations of novels you’ve read doesn’t generally bother you, you should be fine. If not, you might want to give it a pass.
![twilight_book_cover[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/twilight_book_cover1-200x300.jpg "twilight_book_cover[1]")
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