Movie Review: Twilight

Once in a while, a movie comes along that makes me wonder what the forty-something movie critic sitting next to me in the theater watching Say Anything wrote. Did Some Kind of Wonderful or, let’s say for convenience's sake, Lost Boys, get one star, or a thumbs down? If so, do those movies really deserve low ratings? Sometimes a movie makes me wonder how a movie critic is really supposed to do his job.

Twilight is such a film.

Whenever this happens, I never seem able to avoid the conclusion that my job, as film critic, is to let a movie build my lens to the greatest extent possible, and then try my best to hate it… viewed through that lens.

It’s a complicated view that I won’t go into further here, and it turns watching a film into a strange experience, but if that’s not what I’m doing, I don’t think I’m actually doing anything that serves a purpose.

Twilight is the story of Bella Swan, a teenage girl who moves to a small, rainy town to live with her father, and slowly falls for her new school’s chief resident bad boy, Edward Cullen. It turns out that Edward and his family are all vampires. This fact will ultimately lead to Bella being put into great danger because of her exposure to other vampires, and chases and angst will follow. It is also completely irrelevant to the film. This is not a vampire story. It’s a story that happens to have vampires in it. That there are vampires is perhaps why we’re listening, but that should not be confused with what we’re listening to.

We get moving when Bella first meets Edward, and he seems repelled by her. Through rather mundane high school events, the two… acknowledge each other. When Edward suddenly and dramatically saves Bella from being crushed by a van, things start spinning. Meanwhile, some non-home team vampires are beginning to scatter corpses around.

We quickly move to a fairly simple, yet varied, examination of Bella and Edward, with a smattering of plot event driving us forward through their relationship. Bella tries to understand what makes Edward tick, then doesn’t really love what she learns, then shuffles off to meet the vampire family. Edward tries not to eat Bella, then tries really, really hard not to eat Bella, then tries to save Bella’s life, then very nearly eats Bella in order to save her life. The beauty of a nicely put together metaphor should not be overlooked.

Article Author: Marc Eastman

Marc Eastman has been writing film reviews for nearly a decade, and several branches of the internet’s film review world have seen his name. He currently writes his own entertainment blog at www.areyouscreening.com and has contributed to several sites, including CinemaBlend.com. …

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