Twilight is on DVD March 21, 2009 and I thought I would give my take on the film.
Twilight **1/2
Twilight is a moody dark tale of teen angst that is not particularly a great cinematic achievement. It is however a great packaged piece of cinematic pop culture. It is Lost Boys meets Dawson's Creek.
Bella moves to Forks, Washington. She is drawn to the mysterious Edward Cullen and like Bella we are too. It is no big surprise that he is a vampire. And so the romantic saga begins. As a romantic goes, Edward is kind of over protective voyeuristic and creepy. Bella is headstrong and seems kind of emotionally detached from the world around to everything but the hypnotic stare of Edward. The two make love work because Edward some how resists the urge to feed on her, but the romance is challenged when another vampire, James, wants feed on Bella. And the battle for Bella begins with Edward and James.
The production values are slick on Twilight. The make up on Edward as well as all the vampires in the movie is very heavy handed but it is some what balanced out by the washed out cinematography. It kind of makes them cool and goth. There are voice overs in the film by Bella and I did not understand the use of them in the film. Nothing that Bella said in the voice overs told me anything that the plot and the characters themselves did not already tell me.
Twilight is not a bad film. I still could not get out of my head that I was watching some teen drama on the CW or ABC Family channel. It is entertaining enough and is a slickly packaged teen angst meets horror film. Twilight is for me is kind of guilty pleasure movie. One that I might watch again on a rainy day and i feel like watching a moody teen angst horror film.
By: William Moon
ReplyDeleteI would rate this film ** out of ****, and before I hear any complaints, yes, I have indeed, read the book and isn't incredibly better, in my opinion. The problem with Twilight is that it is mostly fluff trying to take itself too seriously. What should have been a completely camped out overly romanticized film came across as an uneven film, stemming mostly from bad effects and direction from Catherine Hardwicke. Hardwicke manages to pull out, once again, nice performances from her leads, but the whole film really does look like it belongs on t.v. with Heroes and Buffy. If you enjoy those shows, you might enjoy Twilight, but I've become a little more spoiled on my special effects as of lately. I almost prefer the people flying on invisible wires effects to the fake-looking CGI in this film. For a film to be so intimate with its two leads, it sure does rely a lot on technology to get through it. The film goes back and forth between being a quite good serious, teen romantic film, and a poorly editing/effects film trying to be more serious than it is. It either needed better effects or to be campy throughout and it never accomplished either. Also, the vampire clan of the Cullen's were all thrown intogether and not fully fleshed out.