Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

Screenplay: Melissa Rosenberg

Running time: 2 hrs 2 mins

Genre: Romance/Horror



CRITIQUE:


Since the first advent of bloodsuckers into the screen, from the German Expressionist Nosferatu to Dracula’s oft-repeated reign, vampires have been the black-clad, fanged creatures that inhabit the dark corners. And since vampirism is really a metaphor for illicit sexual hedonism, cinematic leading men of the same species began looking like either Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire – so audience of the female kind can expel a carnal sigh. Twilight, a fledgling saga that’s phenomenally massive to adolescent girls in the Stateside, continues this tradition. Stephanie Meyer provides the source material, impossibly good-looking bloodsuckers, angst-ridden heroine, gloomy, mist-wrapped backdrop – and Thirteen director Catherin Hardwicke conveys the vision. Honestly, has anyone in this Earth seen enough of The Lost Boys and The Covenant?


Stewart and Pattinson makes for an endearing screen couple, but where teenage girlies think of this as an outlet for young passion, Twilight suffers for its lack of novelty. It is laden with clichés – the vampires are distractingly flour-faced, pallid and ashen, as though the make-up department believes it is de rigueur for these undead humans; a fresh flesh (Bella) moves into new town, falls in love with local high school hunk who is so mysterious that everyone in the campus knows what he exactly was. This is a material that Nicholas Sparks used to specialise in. And the American high school environment is ridden with stereotypes that you can almost indentify personalities without even looking: the know-it-all Asian, the loner, the ‘cool’ gang – the introduction of Edward Cullen and Co results in a slow-motion pageantry ‘American High School’ movies typically employ.


Even the romance barely soars, it’s clammy and awkward, with Pattinson trying to give his best shot at the supposedly emotionally-tormenting scene in the forest, Stewart mainly appropriates, but there is no poetry here. There is a slight push of European aesthetic by playing Debussy as a classical piece, but it remains a soundtrack-infested Hollywood manufacturing. The visual exposition of Edwards as a vampire as he bathes in the sunlight is cringing: rule number one in the vampire book, they burn under the sunlight. Since Meyer is reportedly unorthodox, it’s visible in the plotting where it becomes laboured. The only complexity comes in when renegade trio of vampires arrive, and the film’s main villain James is appallingly one-dimensional. Its climax has the visual thrill of a Saturday sitcom. To those who hasn’t seen this, might as well skip it, and rather watch the best vampire film for years, the Swedish atmospheric masterpiece Let The Right One In.


VERDICT:

A lush cinematography aside – Twilight barely works because it’s a poorly assembled, post-modern pile of twaddle. Has anybody noticed that this is Anne Rice-lite, by way of The O.C. via The Lost Boys alley? And at times, it descends into Mormonic vampire soap opera.



RATING: D