Three out of four stars (Rated Pg-13 for some violence and a scene of sensuality) Running time: 122 minutes. Reviewed at the Market Street Cinemark on November 21.
“Twilight” is the first installment of Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling series about teenage vampires living among the hoi polloi in Forks, Washington, population 3,121, where seldom is heard a discouraging word but the skies are cloudy all day.
I should add everyone has straight, bright and shiny pearl white teeth that seem to glow as though the government has been secretly dumping nuclear power plant waste in a nearby mountain.
I knew so little about the movie version of “Twilight” until I saw a segment on the news the other night about the world premiere attended mostly by teenage girls, the target market cohort. The girls were screaming as though the clock had been turned back almost 45 years ago when the Beatles first appeared on Ed Sullivan.
So what is all the excitement about? I had to go see for myself.
The story opens in Phoenix, where young Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart of “Into the Wild”) lives with her mother and her second husband, a minor league baseball player. Bella is being shipped off to Forks to stay with her father Charlie (Billy Burke), the town police chief.
Handed the keys to a well-used red pickup truck, the sullen and withdrawn Bella heads off to high school, where classmates greet her almost instantaneously as just one of the gang.
Bella notices a family of five with pasty white skin and amazing hairdos that all sit together in the cafeteria, not eating. They are the Cullen’s, whose father Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) is the town doctor.
In biology class Bella gets to sit next to Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), one of the clan who looks like Edward Scissorhands sans the cutlery after an extensive hair makeover. Edward is somewhat curt to Bella at first, and then doesn’t show up for class for the next few days.
But then he returns, beginning a somewhat awkward friendship that slowly evolves into a romance. It also begins the first of the leaden dialogue that permeates the entire movie: “I plan to confront him and demand to know what his problem was.” I wasn’t expecting Arthur Miller here, but some of the lines are so wooden you’d expect the Pacific Northwest to be engulfed in flames every time someone in town says something.
Okay, from here Edward miraculously saves Bella from a skidding van that threatens to crush her in the school parking lot, leading to this next jewel: “It’s amazing. He got to me so fast. He was nowhere near me.” Oh no, more dialogue!
Perhaps if Bella would get her eyes checked she’d notice that the eternally brooding Edward has pointed little ears like Eddie Munster. And that he has superpowers that allowed him to crush in the side of the van. Could he be a vampire? Cue the music.
But skeptical Bella goes down a checklist just to be sure: “You’re impossibly fast and skin cold; sometimes you talk like you’re from another time; and you never eat or drink.” Of course he’s a vampire, 107 years old and stuck in high school for an eternity, like the comic strip character LuAnn DeGroot.
On it goes from here, as Bella is indoctrinated into the Cullen family ways, at great risk to her safety when one nomad vampire named James (Cam Gigandet, channeling Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance) wants to suck her blood.
The door is left open for a second installment. Okay, I’ll bite.
