Twilight

Last night was the premiere of Twilight, directed by Catherine Hardwicke. The crowd was thick with giggling 17 year old girls dressed in "Team Edward" or "Team Jacob" t-shirts. I've never read the books so I'm proud to say that I came to the viewing completely neutral on the warring factions and on the film itself. The movie turned out to be, as my friend put it, "porn for teenagers."

The premise of the story is pretty simple. Bella is the new girl at school, pale despite her Phoenix origins, who easily falls in with the right crowd. She attracts the attention of every guy in school, most notably Edward Cullen, one of the "weird" kids. And of course, it turns out that he's a vampire, and despite all that he goes through to keep himself away, he and Bella end up in this lustful romance. It takes Bella on a whirlwind trip away from normalcy and straight into a supernatural adventure with strong sexual themes.

Bella comes face-to-face with with several sexual dynamics. The first is Jacob, the "boy next door" whose skin is oddly tanned for a guy from Washington State. He's from a local Indian tribe and teaches Bella some of the local lore. Then there's Mike and Eric, her two high school friends that ask her out between fits of giggling. There's Edward, of course. And then finally there's James, another vampire, whose sexual prowess so far more mature and frightening than anything little Bella has had to face before.

One thing the movie develops very well is its high school characters. Hardwicke is very careful to takes the movie's high school characters seriously rather than letting them become caricatures. Even though the reason for Bella's integration into a school group feels forced and is explained with a quick "You're like a shiny new toy," it feels more like her making friends was to move the plot along and get the the good part more than anything else. For a movie that attempts to flow naturally and build organic relationships, this was the most awkward part.

The actors playing the high schoolers were spot-on. They weren't given very many lines or very many scenes but had to communicate their characters and relationships with a few subtle looks and a lot of body language. They did an excellent job, particularly Jessica Stanley (Anna Kendrick). It is the fault of far too many high school movies that they let the immaturity of youth become a joke and devalue the story that is being told. Hardwicke made sure that the kids felt like they were part of the joke and that we were laughing at the characters rather than their situation. Mike and Eric's attempts at asking out Bella were just awkward enough to be real and slightly nostalgic.

But of course the real meat of the story is Edward and Bella's relationship. The driving force of the obsession with Twilight is of course Edward's reaction to Bella, which Robert Pattinson pulls off perfectly. If Pattinson had taken the role any less seriously, it would've been campy, but he keeps the role genuine. Kristin Stewart, on the other had, was flat. Hardwicke was apparently going for a neutral take on the character but Stewart just couldn't pull off the role. Any emoting that the character did felt like Hardwicke was posing her rather than feeling as if she had any genuine conviction, and because of Stewart's lack of presence on screen the scenes between Edward and Bella were not magical. Each scene felt as if they should be sexually charged and make all the girls in the audience melt. Pattinson tried to force sexual energy into each scene, each gaze, and each adoring line, but Stewart's constant blank face took away from any chemistry. She's the human and he's the undead- why is she the one that is so cold then?

But that's not to say that she ruined the movie. Stephanie Meyer's book had one more plot twist- the introduction of another clan of vampires, named Victoria, James and Laurent. James is a tracker vampire who now intends to hunt Bella both for the pleasure of the hunt and Edward's rage. His performance creates a sexual force that is more mature and terrifying. Whereas with Edward and Bella's relationship there is a fear of the unknown and a sense of Bella's naivety, James' pure pleasure in the hunt is dripping with overtones of rape and fear.

The entire movie works to be a combination of a forbidden love story and a terrifying initiation into adulthood. Hardwicke shot the movie only when it was foggy outside, both for story reasons and to set the tone of the story. Each scene was tightly packed, and with the exception of a meadow scene, each scene developed the story's plot. Unfortunately, unless you have read the novels, what was going on on-screen sometimes didn't make sense. Hardwicke's insistence on using a hand-held camera for many shots often took away from the scene. The story is so beautifully and artfully developed that the grittiness and reality of using a hand-held took away from that and lowered it. We're not supposed to be in reality.

Overall, the story was interesting. When the DVD comes out I hope that they have an optional "screaming fangirls" over the movie so that non-fans know which parts are important and which aren't. The only people who are really going to be interested in the film are the ones who are already fans of the series. Everyone else is going to be left scratching their heads.