I Watched "Twilight"

So, months of Coronavirus quarantine has lead me to this. I've been indulging in some of the more popular movies that I'd skipped or missed from the 2000s, including "Legally Blonde" and "The Ring." This brought me to the "Twilight" movies, which are far back enough in time now that they're starting to become nostalgic for people of a certain age. There have been some re-evaluations and kinder takes floating around recently too, so in the interests of my own pop-culture literacy, I figured it was time to take the plunge. After all, I've been listening to complaints and dissections about this series for years. It's high time I formed my own opinion.

And so, the original 2008 "Twilight" directed by Catherine Hardwicke is.... a bad movie. It's not an egregiously bad movie, but it's boring, it's way too long, it makes no sense, the humor's terrible, and a lot of the production values are pretty sad. Remarkably, Kristen Stewart delivers a perfectly good performance as Bella Swan, and she carries the film without any problems. Robert Pattinson is awful, but the character he's playing is awful to the point that he's kinda hilarious, so I enjoyed him regardless. It was fun seeing Anna Kendrick as one of Bella's classmates, and Justin Chon sporting one of the worst haircuts I've ever seen on film. Good grief.

As far as teen romances go, this is far from the worst I've seen. Sure, the dialogue is wooden, and the chemistry is flimsy, but I understand completely why this was such a big hit with teenage girls. This is totally pandering to that audience. It's full of supernatural creatures but very little horror, tons of teenage angst, but no adult consequences. The Pacific Northwest locations look fabulous, and the minimal score is a nice change of pace from the aggressive song-based soundtracks of similar films. The arguments that have been thrown around about the Bella and Edward relationship being unhealthy is missing the point. This is immature teenagers being idiots together and breaking the rules, not level-headed adults setting healthy boundaries and negotiating priorities. It's a fantasy film in every respect.

The "Twilight" vampires are essentially the kids from "Tuck Everlasting" with a couple of the more showy vampire traits - super strength and agility, ultra pale skin, and some limited mental powers. I find them utterly fascinating for being so deeply, deeply uncool in spite of all this. The good vampires are a ridiculously wholesome family, the Cullens, who play baseball and walk around their high school together in slow motion. They make almost no attempt to blend in with the normies, and are so obviously people out of the wrong era that it's exasperating that it takes Bella nearly an hour to catch on. They describe themselves as "vegetarians" because they don't drink human blood, but are endlessly miserable about it. Edward goes on multiple anguished rants about being a monster and a killer. It's very much so-bad-it's-good territory.

Despite all this, the film does make me a little wistful for that brief time in pop culture where the "Twilight" films were making an absurd amount of money every year, signalling loud and clear to Hollywood that teenage girls would turn out in droves for a film that took their tastes into account. The YA fantasy trend died with the third "Divergent" film, but it did net us a few decent hits like "The Hunger Games." There were a handful of supernatural romances that tried to follow the "Twilight" formula more closely, but not as many as I would have expected. I liked some of these as well, including "Warm Bodies" and "Beautiful Creatures."

I'm tempted to watch the rest of the "Twilight" series just to enjoy the absurdity, which I understand gets ratcheted up considerably in the later installments. The prospect of Michael Sheen and Rami Malek hamming it up as vampires is pretty tempting. On the other hand, I'd just be watching the further adventures of the "Twilight" gang to gawk at their monstrosity, which I don't feel right about either. I'm long past being part of the franchise's target audience, and I think it's best to leave these films to their actual, non-ironic fans.
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