Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 1985 Howard Storm movie Once Bitten. Today, he looks at the 2008 Catherine Hardwicke movie, Twilight. This article will contain spoilers.
So the adventure into Twilight begins with, of course, the first movie in the series, based off of the book of the same name. (Originally, the book was apparently supposed to be named ‘Forks,’ which is the very much non-fictional town where the action is set; the publisher was probably right to change it as ‘Twilight’ is much more resonant with what this enterprise is actually trying to convey, but in a vacuum, a vampire story in a town named Forks is a pretty good start.)
This is supposedly the good one in the franchise; I can see how people would think that. This is far from the worst movie we’ve covered here in any objective sense; it’s better than Once Bitten from last week, it’s better than a number of its mid-2000s contemporary vampire films, it’s far better than BloodRayne. It might have been the hardest to watch for me, though. Just about every choice in focus, weight, and pacing here is just not my style and not what I like to watch. Which makes sense! This is a, from what I can tell, mostly-faithful adaptation of a romance novel aimed at women in their teens to early thirties. I’m in the right age bucket but have all the wrong sensibilities. I also, separately, think it’s fairly poorly done in terms of craft, both in raw material and execution. These combine to leave me in a situation where most of this movie just slides right off my brain. I’m kind of dreading what the next four are going to be like. Maybe they’ll get satisfyingly weird with it, or be bad in an interesting way. I’ve already seen clips of the vampire baby.
The biggest issue for my personal sensibility here is that Twilight, while certainly a movie with many vampires in it, isn’t a vampire movie. This is not a particularly hot take, I don’t think, but it’s worth explicating why that’s true; this isn’t “not a vampire movie” because Meyer got her lore wrong about vampires or because there’s not a lot of blood or because they’re all really hot — though some of these complaints are adjacent to the real concern, all of them can be true in a vampire movie. No, Twilight is not a vampire movie because it’s not actually concerned with monstrosity in the slightest. It’s not even really concerned with the relationship between vampires and the humans they prey upon, though some of the dialogue sounds like it’s gesturing in that general direction whenever Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) talk about their relationship. Twilight is a movie with that most bog-standard of romance plots throughout the English-speaking world for the last three hundreds years: A beautiful girl from meager stock draws the attention, affection, and eventually love of a rich boy far above her station, and a comedy (and drama) of manners ensues as he elevates her into a new, exclusive, luxurious life that has very real dangers for an unprepared insophisticate who isn’t learned in the ways of gentlefolk. The modern version of this plot usually has our plucky heroine deploying her wit, skill, and iconoclasm to teach the stuffy courtiers who disapprove of their love a lesson; Twilight is a more, ah, traditional tale, where the man solves everything and the woman mainly just does as she’s told. Because here, the rich people all really do have superpowers and really were born better, and she’s just some girl from the sticks.
The movie’s beats aren’t built around the tension between Edward’s vampire nature and his human consideration of Bella, or the violence and transgression — especially sexual — inherent in his condition; he is, after all, a yadda yadda however many years old man trivially cornering and claiming a seventeen year old as his bride. Edward defeats the problem of his vampiric nature, which is really just a re-flavoring of “Love at first sight…but she’s a commoner! This is forbidden!” by their second biology class together, roughly a half hour into the film’s 130-odd minute runtime. From then the tension is mainly one of acceptance — “Will she love me, even though I’m rich and immortal and glisten in the sun?” — and then of propriety — “Will our families allow us to be together?” The dialogue does dwell a lot on the difference between vampire lives and human lives, but the focus of that is almost all social; when she finally gets invited to their weird mansion and is shown around the place gawping, it is very much a poor girl seeing how the lord of the manor lives, rather than being horrified at her seemingly-beautiful lover spending his days sleeping in a coffin beneath the earth, connecting his alluring visage to the reality of his death. No, the Cullens have a pretty cool pad, all things considered. Another way in which they’re the debauched, aristocratic rich is that all the adopted sons and daughters of Doctor Cullen are sleeping together, paired off into bonded couples.
We do eventually get some actual physical tension and conflict in this movie in the last half hour, when James (Cam Gigadent), an out-of-control serial killing hedonist vampire from out of town, wanders into things and decides he wants to kill Bella himself. James, his girlfriend Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre), and their third Vincent (Edi Gathegi) are the closest we get to actual vampires in this film instead of what’s going on with the Cullen “family;” James even gets a sub-class — he’s apparently a “hunter,” which is a kind of vampire that behaves, well, like an actual vampire, in that he’s got the scent of Bella and now he’s gonna hunt her down, kill her, and eat her. Since this physical threat is just set dressing to move pieces into place on the film’s more important emotional terrain, he mostly spends a lot of time running around in the woods as an excuse for Bella to say what the script clearly thinks is real out of pocket, emotionally abusive stuff to her father (honestly if this is the worst a cop dad ever hears from his teen daughter, he’s gotten off light) and do some relationship building with the other Cullens. There is a climax where we get something like a fight scene with James and he meets his end; you can very much tell the action is not the focus of the picture, and it’s mostly reduced to swooping and posing and quick cuts for non-athlete actors. My first instinct was that these were Buffy fights, but I think those were actually a little more involved once that series really got rolling. You do get the distinct whiff of TV choreography here, even if the production values are silver screen.
The movie closes at the long-promised high school prom, with a bit of a teaser for where this series is going as Jacob (Taylor Lautner) shows up for the first time in forty minutes or so. He is part of the extremely replacement-level new kid in town/new kid at school B plot that the film has, where Bella makes a bunch of new friends in town all for the payoff of some sad shots of her not being able to hang out with them in the back half of the film because she’s too busy playing vampire games. The friends, headed up by Anna Kendrick doing valiant work to even make herself memorable through the material, are bubbly and inoffensively likeable and signal to you the viewer very early on that this isn’t gonna be the kind of vampire movie where they all get brutally murdered. I of course already know Jacob’s deal, and the film expects the viewer to already know Jacob’s deal — but they don’t do much of anything with it yet except establish that he and Edward don’t like each other very much, and haven’t for a pretty long time. We’ll be seeing a lot more of him down the road, I expect. The last ten minutes of this thing are all set up for the subsequent films everyone here has already signed on to make; Bella asks to become a vampire, Edward refuses (because if he turns her here we won’t have any more movies), James’s girlfriend Victoria lurks and smirks to give us maybe some semblance of an actual conflict moving forward. Credits.
I am a huge fan of Robert Pattinson’s post-Twilight career, and have surprisingly found myself a defender of Kristen Stewart’s as well, as the relatively high man on her work in a lot of my friend circles — her project choice in the 2010s was questionable at best, but she was usually the most enjoyable part of whatever dreck she was in (this was incredibly true of her and Jesse Eisenberg in American Ultra, a movie that is astoundingly less than the sum of its parts), and Crimes of the Future and Love Lies Bleeding are showing a bit more discernment from her, though I haven’t seen the latter yet — the most recent K-Stew film I’ve personally watched was Underwater (2019), where they basically tried to do Alien under the sea. I enjoyed her in it, but again…project discernment. Pattinson needs no defense; he certainly picks his own clunkers, like would-be-prestige-Tom-Holland vehicle The Devil All The Time, but he still makes sure to get his when he’s on screen in them. And he’s currently Batman, so you know. (Stewart would make an excellent Kate Kane.)
I can’t say I like either of them in this film, because the script is dog water and I find both Edward Cullen and Bella Swan contemptible, but I do appreciate their attempts to make it work. Edward’s a selfish, preening, whining freak whose relationship instincts lead him first towards clumsy gaslighting and then to unseemly, aggressive possessiveness; I would love to know who came up with the bit where they’re running away from the baseball game and he throws Bella into the passenger’s seat of the Jeep and then tries to buckle her in like she’s a child, and she has to scream at him that she’s fine and he should get in the driver’s seat. Was that in the script? Was that director Catherine Hardwicke’s idea? Did Pattinson and Stewart ad-lib it? Was it simply taken wholesale from Meyer’s original text? I’m not going to read that book, so I’ll never know. But it is authentically Edward; Pattinson very consistently plays him like a man dealing with a child he wants to marry, and we have ample evidence of him as a craftsman to say that’s intentional.
Bella Swan for her part is more than eager to be a pet or a child bride or really even just die, if you please, so long as that’s what Edward’s decided. Stewart plays her with a depressed, standoffish energy that’s more or less all you can do with that script, especially the teen high school parts, and if there’s any coherence across her scenes with various characters (and the occasional, distracting, bad narration the script calls for Bella to perform) it is that she really sees no special reason to be alive outside of Edward. She makes this decision in that same biology class where Edward gets over his “I hate how she makes me feel; never again shall we meet!” nonsense. I am hopeful Stewart will be able to bend this role to her will more readily in one of the next, Jesus Christ, four films; I am not optimistic.
There’s also just some weird production stuff in the movie which isn’t as tight as you’d expect from a massive franchise-launching live action Hollywood tentpole. The Cullens are caked in makeup on their faces to pale them out and make them look like weird corpse-people, which is perfectly fine; but there are shots, like when Bella’s in the emergency room and the good Dr. Cullen is taking her blood sample, where you can see they didn’t get the actor’s neck with the same treatment. When Bella is doing research on vampires in the one thirty-second or so montage we get that explains their whole deal in this universe, she reads out of a prop book that looks almost AI generated it’s so shoddy, with a typo front and center in a section title. You’d think they’d catch stuff like that, is all.
The baseball scene was good, though! Like whatever, it was a baseball scene in a movie, but I very much appreciated that all their hats were the old turn of the century pre-New Era sponsorship deal types that you’d see on barnstormers in the twenties and thirties, and they played without gloves because back in those days, baseball players didn’t have dedicated mitts! And they needed them a lot more than vampires do. I’ve heard people complain they’re not playing by the rules or whatever; they don’t have enough people for a full game of two teams, so they’re clearly doing a home run derby variant. More baseball scenes like this, please. (Obviously no one has listened in the nearly two decades since.) I was also disappointed that the movie audibled away from baseball so soon when the bad guys appeared and asked to play; this was maybe the one scene in the movie I wish had gone longer. At least go a couple innings of real old-school deadball with super-strength, even if that wasn’t in the novel.
Next week, I suspect, the Hot Boy Wars begin, Edward versus Jacob, in Twilight: New Moon.
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