In Cinemas from Thursday Dec 11 [M]

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

Runtime: 121mins

Someone in the pop culture control room must have flipped the switch from zombies to vampires, because the bloodsuckers are everywhere right now. Twilight, based on the ridiculously popular novel, puts its vampires in high school, with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) as the obligatory new kid at Forks High who falls for bad boy Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who is naturally one of the undead. This takes Bella a fair chunk of movie to realise, despite Edward being so pale he looks like a girl who has broken into mummy’s make-up closet and discovered foundation for the first time.

Most of the movie is dedicated to their romance, but romantically Edward crosses the line between obsessed lover and creepy stalker, though nobody seems to think that breaking into her room to watch her sleep is a bit wrong. Their relationship is chaste however, which will please parents dragged along by tweens, but does strike an off-note. It’s a trashy movie that doesn’t even have the decency to put some properly enjoyable trash in.

The abstinence enforced by Edward’s unwillingness to lose control around Bella is presented as a positive – he’s the perfect boyfriend you see, who just wants to talk all night long. Because anything more and he might kill you. There’s a message there that’s also a bit wrong. Twilight is a post-goth vampire movie, from which all of the fun parts have been extracted leaving only the angst.

As well as the lack of sexual tension there’s a lack of dramatic tension. While Edward and his family drink animal blood, there’s a trio of nasty vampires in Forks who prefer people, but the confrontation between the two groups is unintentionally hilarious. There’s a lot of hissing but no sense of threat. (On the subject of unintentional hilarity, the reason these vampires avoid sunlight is that it makes their skin glitter like a teenager’s MySpace. Like the overdone make-up and the blur-legged running to show how fast the undead are, it’s cheesy and cheap-looking.) The ending, when it finally arrives, is just an arrow pointing at the inevitable sequel.

Several of the actors trapped in Twilight like bugs in amber turn in credible performances, especially Billy Burke as Bella’s loving but undemonstrative father who is conveniently also chief of police. Bella’s schoolfriends seem believably juvenile teenagers and steal some laughs between the emoting of the leads. Still, you’d do better to rent The Lost Boys or maybe some Buffy instead.

**       

JODY MACGREGOR

Comments (8)

8. Written by Bella, on 18-01-2009 06:52 I think that the twilight saga is good.     And I will add that the movie are diffrent from the book in many points. BUT both are very, very good.

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