Twilight (2008)

What a Stupid Lamb

I knew this moment would come, but I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t.  When I introduced the idea of taking people’s recommendations for my reviews, I started the timer on when today would actually arrive.  It actually took a lot longer than I expected.  From the start, most people reacted to my request for recommendations with movies I would probably hate (Hannah Montana: The Movie, for instance), but not until just recently did someone actually unleash true punishment on me.  They requested it almost a month ago, and I put it off as long as I could, but it’s time has come.  I decided to start doing it on March first somewhat arbitrarily, but I decided that the reason I started in March was because I want everyone involved in this movie to march off the nearest cliff.  All that being said, Chris, Krunchee, and Ashley requested it, so I begrudgingly present you with my review of Twilight, based on a series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, written for the screen by Mark Lord and Melissa Rosenberg, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Sarah Clarke, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Cam Gigandet, Rachelle Lefevre, Edi Gathegi, Anna Kendrick, Christian Serratos, Michael Welch, Gregory Boyce, Justin Chon, and Taylor Lautner.

Though no such back story was given, I assume that Isabella “Bella” Swan (Kristen Stewart) was dropped on her head as a child by her father, Charlie Swan (Billy Burke), which caused her mother, Sarah Clarke (Renee Dwyer), to taker her away from him.  Cut to age seventeen and, even though Bella’s speech impediment has not cleared up, momma has a new man now, so she pawns Bella off on her father and hits the road in search of adventure.  Bella moves in with her dad in a town that is somehow named Forks and starts going to high school there, quickly meeting and befriending Jessica (Anna Kendrick), Angela (Christian Serratos), Mike (Michael Welch), Tyler (Gregory Boyce), and Eric (Justin).  They tell her about the strange family that hangs out together (and probably gets busy together) called the Cullens, comprised of father Carlisle (Peter Facinelli), mother Esme (Elizabeth Reaser), Alice (Ashley Greene) who is probably fucking her “brother” Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), and Rosalie (Nikki Reed) who is probably fucking her “brother” Emmett (Kellan Lutz).  But Bella decides to get all kinds of hot and bothered over Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), roughly around the same time hundreds of thousands of 12-year-old girls do.  Bella gets intrigued by Edward.  There was just something about his pasty white skin, pointy teeth, pitch black eyes, and his bat wings that catches her attention.  He, however, looks like he wants to throw up whenever she comes near.  Britney Spears’ new perfume really doesn’t smell that good, I’m with you Eddie.  She starts getting closer to Edward after he shoves a car away to save her life.  She still hasn’t caught on yet.  Well eventually it turns out that he’s a vampire, along with all of the Cullens.  But they don’t eat people.  The other three vampires – James (Cam Gigandet), Victoria (Rachelle Lefevre), and Laurent (Edi Gathegi) – do.  A lot.  It’s beginning to cause trouble for the Cullen family (apparently.  It’s never really shown in the movie) but Bella and Edward can’t be concerned with that because they’re having some angsty love situation.

Fuck this movie.  You know what made me hate Drive so much?  It’s not ONLY that the movie itself was awful, but it was how many people tried to explain to me that I was wrong.  And when that happened to Drive, it made me think about Twilight, and Heaven help anyone that makes me think about Twilight!  The story of this movie is high school drama bullshit in the background, vampire movie in the foreground, and neither one worth watching.  Much as with Ghost Rider, I took too many notes watching this movie, so I’m just going to have to go in order with the things that pissed me off about this movie.  One of the first irritants I came across in this movie was Edward’s reaction to Bella.  At first, it was never explained why he looked like he was going to blow chunks the second he smelled her.  As a member of the audience, I couldn’t tell what her hygiene was.  I completely understand getting sick when spending time with Kristen Stewart, but it wouldn’t show up in a physical manifestation for me to get irritated with her and want to punch her in the face … unless I DID punch her in the face, then I guess that would be physical.  When Edward stops the car from hitting Bella it served to make me very angry that he didn’t let the movie end right then, but it also pissed me off at Bella’s stupidity even further.  Her first question is “How did you get here so fast?” and not “How is your pimp hand so strong that you just bitch-smacked that car away and dented it’s side?”  There are people that could run fast enough to cross that parking lot, especially since your attention had been turned towards the car and he could have reacted faster than a tree sloth as you did.  What humans CAN’T do is bitch-smack cars out of the way.  But Bella’s denseness was not for only this scene.  I wondered through the first half of this movie if Bella would eventually catch on to what’s going on by the third movie.  Thankfully, they decided to throw that in here so we could move on without this shitty attempt to keep it a secret.  His paleness, sharp teeth, inexplicable absence when the sun was out, ability to run inhumanly fast and bitch-smack cars, not eating, showing up when she was in danger; none of this helped Bella.  Jacob had to practically say it to her face and then she figured it out about 20 minutes later.  I grant that I went in to this movie knowing he was a vampire and she was stupid, but I think I would’ve figured it out when I first saw them.  Why does everyone in monster movies seemingly live in a world where no one has ever made a monster movie that they can connect the dots to?  At some point in the movie, the random deaths of people around town causes Bella’s father to give her a bottle of mace to carry with her, and she seems really put off by this.  YOU JUST ARRIVED HOME FROM A TRIP THAT ALMOST HAD YOU GETTING GANGRAPED!  And THEN you followed that up by going to he scene of a homicide with a vampire.  God, you’re thick, Bella!  I laughed to myself when Edward and Bella started dating officially because he decided to wear a pair of sunglasses and act like “the cool guy” because of it, but it just reminded me of Tobey McGuire in Spiderman 3.  The whole relationship between Edward and Bella is a little icky because it’s roughly the equivalent of me dating a hamburger, and people called me weird for doing that so we had to break up … plus, I ate her.  And Bella isn’t much smarter than Patty was before her untimely death, so don’t give me that shit either.  The ending of the movie didn’t really make sense to me either, but I’m not going to throw up a spoiler alert because I don’t want you people watching this movie anyways.  At the end of the movie, Bella has been being hunted by James and is cornered in a ballet studio where he starts torturing her for his own amusement, and to film and send to Edward as a fuck you.  But wasn’t his only driving factor the hunt?  If that’s the case, then the hunt was over and he should’ve eaten her by the time Edward even arrived.  What’s worse than that is that Bella gets beaten up, has her leg broken, has a piece of glass stuck in her leg, and was bitten on the wrist.  How do they explain this to the world?  She fell down the stairs!  AND out a window!  (I just realized that smashing the buttons on the keyboard doesn’t properly express my frustration)  This explanation is exactly the same one that victims of abuse use, but much more stupid.

I’m not quite done with the writing yet.  It’s so bad that it gets it’s own paragraph, but here comes the dialogue part.  Completely shitty!  SURPRISE!  In the beginning of the movie, Bella exclaims “It’s perfect!” when her dad gives her the gift of a the very first truck ever made.  It’s every teenaged girl’s fantasy come true!  When Bella finally starts talking to Edward (his inexplicable gagging compulsions having gone away) she goes on about how much she hates the rain, and this speech is very reminiscent of the famous “I hate sand” speech from Star Wars Episode 2.  Both made me yell out “WHY AM I LISTENING TO THIS?!”  This is a movie!  I want to be entertained, not listen to two people talk about their thoughts on the weather and how rain makes things wet.  I don’t remember the context anymore (thankfully my brain is already relieving me of this movie like a splinter being pushed out), but at one point Edward and Bella are talking and she says “Pretend that I am dumb”, and I just giggled to myself for obvious reasons.  One of the biggest problems with the dialogue was how shitty Edward was at keeping his HUGE FUCKING SECRET!  When he’s in the car with Bella, he basically says “I read their mind and they were going to rape you.”  Add that to the other times he let slip something stupid, and the time he saved her from the car, and a peanut butter sandwich would’ve figured it out by now.  Bella got it about 10 minutes later.  It’s pretty easy to figure out why you can’t read someone’s mind when the answer is “Because they lack the necessary equipment to hold up her end of the deal.”  It’s the same reason I can’t watch TV when the power is off.  But how did Edward manage to only have conversations with people with negative IQ’s for 108 years, or have the Cullen family just had to pick up and move after massacring an entire town because Edward said something stupid.  Later, Bella’s stupid little narrations indicate that there are only three things she’s absolutely positive about and they’re all basically that she loves Edward and he wants to eat her.  Really?  Those are the ONLY things that you’re sure of?  You’re not sure that you’re a girl?  Or that your hair is brown?  Or that you’re an idiot?  After Bella knows that Edward is a vampire, they waste a good 10 minutes in the middle of the movie with Bella asking him questions about being a vampire that are stupid, serve no purpose, are unnecessary, and slow the already molasses-like pace of the movie down to almost a stop.  Edward also admits to Bella that he’s been sneaking into her room for the past few months and it just makes her love him more, as opposed to being creeped out.  Bella’s narration also says twice in the movie that she’s “never given much though to how she would die”, but after this movie, I can tell you that I’ve thought about it.  A lot.

I’ll talk briefly about the look of the movie.  It also sucked.  Everything in the movie was gloomy and morose.  I’m sure that’s what they were going for, but it also depressed me to look at it.  That could have just been because I knew I was watching Twilight though.  This movie probably didn’t have a very large budget and I understand that, but adding blurriness to a woman pulling a boat closer or kicking a guy in the chest doesn’t automatically make it look supernatural.  It just makes me think she had a tit fall out.  Speaking of that, the fast running and fast climbing things that Edward did with Bella were some of the least convincing effects in recent memory.  Even worse than that was what they did to the entire vampire mythos: when they decided that vampires don’t walk out into the sunlight and explode into flames, they just become FABULOUS!  Turning vampires in sunlight into glittery sparklefarts pisses me off to no end.  What makes it worse is that Edward reacts to Bella saying he looks beautiful by saying “This is the skin of a killer!”  Really?  Are you sure it’s not the skin of someone who’s spent the entire night in a gay nightclub?  Not that it would matter to Bella anyway since she follows that up with “It doesn’t matter.”  That’s kind of true though; I’ve dated lots of serial murderers.  It doesn’t really matter if the love is there.  I guess about two thousand words into my review is the appropriate time to say something that wasn’t that bad in this movie, and the baseball game and final fight of the movie were somewhat interesting.  The baseball game served next to no purpose, but it was fun to watch superpowered things play baseball.  And James and Edward throwing down at the very end was kind of cool, but too little too late.

Next to the story, the worst thing about this movie is the performances.  And the worst thing about those performances was Kristen Stewart.  Every conversation in this movie was awkward and uncomfortable to watch, and Kristen Stewart was mostly the reason, as she was involved in almost every conversation.  90% of the things coming out of her mouth in this movie was some strange, stuttering, embarrassed, sigh noise that I can best express in text as “Tsh” and “Chuh”.  It’s like someone ran up to her and flashed her their dick right before she started talking so that she was flustered and confused.  Someone argued with me that this was how Bella was written, and I grant that everything else in this movie leads me to believe that Bella was a moron, but Bella was also not written into EVERY Kristen Stewart movie that I’ve seen.  She did the same thing in Adventureland and in The Runaways, and I’m pretty sure Joan Jett was more articulate than this.  It comes to a pinnacle when she’s in the hospital and Edward is talking about leaving her or something and the next 20 “words” out of her mouth are “tshchuhgahchuhgahtsh ….. guh”.  It finally stopped when I slammed my head down on my computer desk and the DVD skipped forward a few seconds.  Robert Pattinson didn’t do much to particularly anger me with his performance, but it wasn’t really good either.  I guess mediocre looks a lot better when you’re mainly acting opposite Kristen Stewart.  Probably the best part about the cast was the girls in the movie.  Nikki Reed, Anna Kendrick, Rachelle Lefevre, and that one Asian friend of Bellas were all pretty nice to look at.  Their characters weren’t interesting, but they sure were purdy.  Technically, Kristen Stewart is attractive too … right up until she talks.  Well, I use “talk” loosely there.  Ashley Greene was the best one, by far.  Not only was she the best looking, but I found her character interesting because of her precognitive abilities, and she acted it in a quirky way that I found cute.  The movie’s reaction to me finally liking one of the characters in the movie was to not have her around very often.  I did have a funny thought on Peter Facinelli as the Cullen “father”, but it was only funny to me because the way he enters when Bella is in the hospital after the car incident made me laugh and change his name to Dr. Handsome McFadden in my mind.  Taylor Lautner wasn’t in this movie very much (probably ’cause he didn’t have them abs yet), and the few times he was in the movie he made me think it was a Native American version of Jason Mewes.

I just got carpal tunnel syndrome from this review.  I hope that the next three movies will be better (or at least that I’ve released the majority of my bile), allowing the next reviews to be shorter and less hateful.  But, judging by the scores on Rotten Tomatoes for the other movies, this will most likely not be the case.  This is actually the highest rated of the four Twilight movies, and that statement just made me very nervous.  But I will go on.  The next three reviews will either be reviews of the remaining Twilight movies, or my suicide letter.  Perhaps both.  My recommendation is that no one should ever watch this movie.  My sincere hope is that no one will ever try to justify their love for this ungodly movie to me again.  At least, if they do, I have almost 3000 words prepared for why I hate it so much.  Women, I know this is a romance movie, but have a little self respect and like one that doesn’t make their heroine look like it would lose a debate to a tree stump.  You’re not required to like everything that has romance in it.  With that, I give Twilight “Well then I hope you enjoy disappointment” out of “Bella, you hit your head.  I think you’re confused.”

Hey, peeps. Why not rate and comment on this as a favor to good ole Robert, eh? And tell your friends! Let’s make me famous!