Overall Rating: D
Filmmaking/Artistic: F
Storytelling: C+
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Overview
Unbelievably cheesy special effects, a very unsympathetic main character (acted poorly), a very brooding vampire (think James Dean with mousse and lots of lipstick), and MTV-productions level of poutiness make this movie very, very difficult to watch, especially if you’re not a girl.
Full Review
Your Movie Monkey saw this in the only venue where he would consider seeing it–while held hostage on a long overseas flight. The Monkey is actually somewhat fond of vampire movies for what they represent. They are often morality tales, where the victim must “give in to temptation” before being attacked. Further, vampire movies (unlike, say, mob movies) are clearly fictional, and thus are more set up to tell a story with a moral.
Your Movie Monkey’s wife Beaudelaire is quite fond of the hit series by Stephanie Meyer, as are several other (exclusively female) friends, so while trapped on the plane, it seemed fine enough to test out. Oy.
The main character is Bella, who is (as are almost all characters in this film except maybe the main vampire) an extreme Hollywood cliche. She is a child of divorced parents with this cool mom who calls her up on her cell to dish about boys. She has gone for some reason to live with her father in a town in the Northwest (called Forks, WA, which made Your Movie Monkey want to do a whole new series set in a poor rural Texas town called Sporks), because she wants to give said cool mom the chance to motorcycle around the country with her new boyfriend, or something. Or, more likely, because she is a morose teenager who needs more people to consume with her self-indulgent Angst.
Bella moves in with her dad, and immediately lets him know that there is nothing he can do to make up for the fact that she hasn’t seen him in many years, and she would also like hot meals, but please not at the diner like you’ve been doing for years, thanks, dad. (Bella is without a doubt the most unsympathetic heroine Your Movie Monkey has seen in a long time. She’s like the Meryl Streep character in Doubt, without the humor.) The dad is the beloved and wise-yet-simple town cop in Forks, who eats every day at the diner and knows people named Flossy.
Dad is also best buddies with a person who is Hollywood Code for the wisest human being on earth, a Native American in a wheel chair. This relationship become relevant because the son of the guy in the wheelchair knows Bella (but goes to school on the Res, so won’t see her much) from previous visits in Bella’s childhood, and he ends up telling her that he is descended from wolves, and wolves for some reason can see vampires for what they are, when not busy howling and marking their territory.
Anyway, Dad gifts Bella a truck (and Your Movie Monkey is sure that the inevitable complaint from Bella about the environmental consequences of a non-hybrid were thankfully edited out), and she rolls in it to The Forks WA High School for The Undead and Really Old Hollywood Cliches. She is greeted by this Asian guy who looks like Onch and who proclaims himself to ”rule the school”. There are also Breakfast-Club/High-School-Musical groups of kids who don’t get along with each other.
And then, there’s Edward Cullen. Edward Cullen is, of course, the vampire, and he looks like, well, imagine you had a magazine geared at men (GQ or whatever), and you took out one of those cologne ads that has a skinny, completely shaven model in a speedo sitting at the base of a really expensive pool or perhaps alpine lake. Now take that model and add quite a bit of lipstick, a quart and a half olf hair gel, and camera angles from any director who cut his teeth at MTV. That’s what Edward Cullen looks like in this movie.
Edward apparently is part of a strange “family” who live in isolation, mostly so they can spend time slicking back each others’ hair. Edward ignores Bella, despite being assigned as her “lab partner”, and will occasionally not show up for school. But it’s clear he likes her, enough that he uses his super strength to prevent a wayward car from hitting her. (The special effect here looks like he is doing a Vulcan mind meld with the car. Your Movie Monkey half expected to hear him say “Your Thoughts are My Thoughts, Your Gears are My Gears” to the car.)
The special effects are quite a problem with this movie, in that they make almost no sense. So Edward is super strong, fine, but somehow this hurling mass of metal stops comes to a complete stop and gets a smallish dent like a fender bender. Apparently vampires change all laws of physics as we know them. In fact, later, in one of the cheesier moments of the movie, Bella visits the vampire family, and after chatting and giggling about how hard it was not to kill her and drink her blood, they take her out for a game of vampire baseball, because vampires, you see, hit the ball so hard that it would sound like a lightning strike to the people in the village below.
So Edward and Bella strike up a relationship, mostly with Bella being condescening and morose, and Edward driven by a desire to harm her. Edward does take her home to “meet the family” as previously described, and they all have slick backed hair and love art, and cook some dinner just for her. Edward explains (and this was an interesting potshot at vegetarians), that they drink animal blood, but just like you can never really be satisfied with tofu, the desire for human blood was overwhelmingly strong.
During this trip, Edward shows her why they don’t go out into the sunlight. Apparently in the book, it was because their skin glittered like diamonds, and people would figure out who they were. In the movie, when Edward removes his shirt to explain the sunlight thing, it may have been the screen on the plane, but Your Movie Monkey thought “You don’t go out into the sunlight because you’re pasty and British?”
Oh yes, and something else we learn in this trip to the family. Vampires can fly. Not run fast, like in the book (according to Beaudeliare). We’re talking “Bella, grab my neck”, a hand outstretched like Zan and Jana calling on the Wondertwin Powers, and a slow, cheesy liftoff to fly to the tops of some trees.
So, at one trip to the vamipre family, they run into a distinctly non-vegetarian group of vampires who decide they want to hunt Bella for sport, and there’s a whole lot of Angst over whose fault it all is, and the bad vampires almost get Bella, but (darn the luck), Edward saves her. Interestingly, the bad vampire James has bitter her, and so Edward must “suck out the poison” (this is how vampires make new vampires… biting but not sucking the blood out to the point of death), and this requires this extraordinary amount of control, because as Edward has said, it is very dangerous to be around him. (Who would have thought “cut and suck” would make such a comeback after being discredited as a snakebite cure?)
This brings up one thematic element of the movie that was quite troublesome to Your Movie Monkey. Throughout, Edward is constantly warning Bella how hard it is for him to control himself (i.e., not kill her for her blood), and how dangerous it is to be around him, but Bella says she doesn’t care (after all, she can be morose with him her whole life and he won’t grow a day older for it!) This seemed strangely like women who stay with abusive partners… he can’t help himself, it’s probably my fault. Hopefully this wasn’t what was intended, but it sure seemed like that message was there.
Overall, probably the best part of the film was Robert Pattinson, who played Edward. He cannot help the clunky, cliched direction and the leading actress whose acting was so horrific. (A scene where he tells her that he is leaving so she won’t be threatened receives from her a ”Hey wha don’t wha hey how why wha” scene reminiscent, at best, of Uncle Buck.) He did the best with what he was given.
The story did have some interest, in that it dreamed this world of vampires with its own mythology and reasoning. And in the end, there was some action. But overall, it was cheesy, with bad direction and mostly bad acting.
The one part Your Movie Monkey did like, well one line, actually, had to do with the morality play aspect of the story. Edward explains to Bella that “every part about me draws you in…. my looks, my hair, my smell. Not that I’d need any of that. I’m the perfect killing machine.” Your Movie Monkey is reminded, at least in small part, of what his daughters will face as they mature and begin to date. Every part of these guys will draw them in. They must be very, very careful. Especially if one of them can fly.
