The film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s teen vampire romance novel, Twilight, has been out in cinemas for a while now, but I've been dragging my heels about seeing it.
I was strangely reluctant to even read Twilight (although I’ve no idea why – given that I was more than happy to follow the adventures of one boy wizard for a decade), but I’m so glad I did. The book is beautifully, dreamily written and I was instantly hooked.
You see, the real reason I was wary of the film is because I’m now reading Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the series, and I didn’t want the complex emotional world that Meyer had created in my head to be toppled by a dumbed-down, effects-laden Hollywood version.
Happily, Twilight isn’t like this at all. It begins with the teenage Bella narrating, just as she does in the book, “I had never given much thought to how I would die....”, as she leaves her scatty mother in hot, dusty Phoenix, and travels to the permanently-overcast town of Forks to live with her father.
Kristen Stewart, with her haunted good looks and wry delivery, is a pitch-perfect Bella – shy, brainy and perhaps more mature than her parents. There’s a slight cinema verité element to everything – all the dialogue and interactions feel very realistic, from Bella’s gruff reunion with her equally awkward father, to the various jolts and discomforts of starting at a new school.
But a contrasting romantic atmosphere takes over when Bella meets the pale, enigmatic Edward (again, played to perfection by Robert Pattinson) who compounds Bella’s discomfort by seeming to think that she smells bad.
But when Edward moves at impossible speed to physically stop a van from ploughing into Bella, she decides she needs to know more. Despite Edward’s warnings that Bella should stay away from him, he’s equally drawn to her.
Which is when Edward confesses that he’s a vampire – one of a family of vampires who have all taken an oath to avoid human blood. Bella falls for Edward, and you can see why. The boy can really smoulder (which I noticed despite Pattinson being several millennia my junior...).
But since Edward thirsts uniquely for Bella’s blood – “you’re like my own personal heroin supply”, he tells Bella - can it ever really be safe to love a vampire?
Twilight is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who brings her indie documentary-style realism from her previous films Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, balancing it perfectly with the romance and suspense of the love story and supernatural aspects. And it's so refreshing to see a novel adaptation that neither ignores the plot nor hamstrings itself by following the novel too faithfully.
There are a few really nice moments - at one point, Edward catches an apple Bella has dropped in lovely reflection of the cover of Meyer's book. Also, there's a scene where he plays piano - an irrational movie pet-hate of mine is when the actor clearly can't play and is just miming, but Pattinson actually plays - in fact he composed some of the music for the film.
All in all I thought it was fantastic, and I’m excited now that Meyer’s second novel in the series, New Moon, is currently in production with both leads on board. It’s a great compliment to them that I didn’t for a minute think of Kristen Stewart as “the daughter from Panic Room” or Robert Pattinson as Cedric Diggory, because I’m usually such a film nerd. In fact, I even forgot Pattinson was English.
I left the cinema on a blissful cloud of gothic romance. I asked the friend I’d dragged along what she’d thought of it. She hadn’t read the book, and a lot of her motivation for accompanying me was around the sweets I’d bribed her with.
“Well,” she said. “It is really a movie for fifteen year old girls. But I loved it, because I’m a fifteen year old girl at heart. Aren’t we all?”
My thoughts exactly.
