All right. I’m only going to say this because I love you, dear reader; because I value our time together, and intend to keep it as honest and forthright as possible. Every man in a Christian marriage must do things to keep his wife happy that he’s not desperate for others to hear about. We know that the love of a good woman is a blessing we did not earn, and sometimes we have to do what it takes to express our gratitude. This very evening, on the six month anniversary of the smartest decision of my life, I did what I had to do.
I went and saw “Twilight.”
All right, all right, just get it out of your system. Laugh, point fingers, do what you have to do. Are you done yet? I’ll wait.
…
Okay. So now let’s talk about this movie. I’m going to give it an official score, but my review will be a little unconventional and you’ll see why when you read.
You know, the funny thing is, Corelyn’s not even that big a fan of the series, but she was deathly curious, so she talked me into seeing it.
“Twilight”
Score: 5.7 (out of 10.0)
Watching Catherine Hardwicke’s attempt at bringing “Twilight” to life leaves me with a single impression: that must have been a great book. Much like the “Harry Potter” series, author Stephanie Meyer’s tale of high school vampires works because it’s erected on a simple yet sturdy narrative frame, one so powerful that it involves the audience whether they like it or not. Meyer had already done the heavy lifting for this movie’s success, but her bedrock foundation is wasted on a poorly designed, horribly executed misfire that fails even on the one level Hollywood trash normally never does: the technical.
There’s a director-shaped hole in “Twilight” where Hardwicke should have been standing. Moments that needed subtlety blow past their mark, stunts and special effects that needed to be convincing are laughable, and visual storytelling is rejected in favor of a terrible voice-over. Worst of all, through the chaos we can still sense the potential of the narrative driving it; it’s like a beautiful engine put in a car missing two wheels.
Maybe you know the story, maybe you don’t, but it’s a great concept so I’ll break it down for you quickly: Bella is the new girl at Forks High School, in Washington state. She quickly falls for a mysterious outsider named Edward Cullen, whose pale skin and inexplicable speed and strength lead her to a secret he is desperate to keep: he’s a vampire. The couple begins a potentially fatal dance around one another, Edward trying to control his overwhelming desire for Bella’s blood, and Bella fully surrendering to her intoxication with Edward. He is from a family of “nice ” vampires, they only hunt animals, but not everyone in this new world is so easygoing.
The genius of this story is that bad boys are cool, but bad boys who are actually the good guy are &*^^ing awesome. Edward intrigues us for the same reason Batman does: he’s dark and creepy, but we can trust him. On top of this, Meyer wisely keeps the seduction fairly chaste, and I appreciate this for two reasons: firstly, I’m sick of our culture’s fairy tales about casual sex. Secondly, she seems to understand that pushing Bella and Edward into bed in this story would diffuse the tension in exactly the same manner as seeing too much of the bad guy in a horror film. Many have misread this as the author being somehow unaware or unwilling to admit that her story is about animal lust, and those people are wrong, she just took the high road.
The movie tries to do right by this example, but it fumbles the ball in too many crucial places. Each time “Twilight” screws it up, it would have been easy for it not to, so I’m going to go through a list, one at a time, of wasted assets this movie possessed. It’s my attempt to highlight how thoroughly the people behind the camera failed their obligation to the story, even when they were trying hard not to.
1. The casting. Hollywood is getting better at casting, even the bad movies make the right calls. Kristen Stewart is magnificent in the lead role of Bella, she acts and feels like a real teenager without condescending the age group. Robert Pattinson, stuck with the hardest job in the movie, is effortlessly cool and takes his role seriously. Billy Burke is wonderful as Bella’s dad, Peter Facinelli gets past his awful makeup and imbues Dr. Cullen with gravitas. The list keeps going, excepting only the thoroughly un-scary Cam Gigandet as the main villain.
How they blew it: They forgot to give these poor actors their motivation. Throughout the movie, I could feel each of them trying to run with their characters, take them someplace, but they’re never allowed. Robert Pattinson in particular goes through some scenes like he has a gun pointed at him from off-camera, because his instincts are good, and he’s as sure as we are that the scene isn’t playing correctly. I could feel him trying to downplay Edward, to put the work into the tiniest details, but he only gets his way about half the time. For the rest of the movie, he’s required to crank his “emote!” meter up to 115 while they blare girly emo in the background. I am positive some reviewers will blame him for failing his character, but he was the right man for the job, and he did the best he could.
2. The cinematography. Magnificent. Really beautiful. Lenser Elliot Davis brings out the cold, dampness of the setting without making it drab. It takes real skill to find cool beauty in such a muddy palette.
How they blew it: The director and the script don’t trust Davis, and they keep piling on dialogue that tells us things we already knew, because our friend Elliot communicated them in two seconds without a single word. About the twentieth time I had to hear, “Gosh, it rains so much here,” I about lost it. In general, this ends up being a theme of “Twilight’s”: shirking visual communication for canned exposition, which is less convincing and more conspicuous. Only a team that really doesn’t believe in its own abilities resorts to this.
3. The action. Meyer’s story found just the right balance of supernatural and realistic; fight scenes are built out of heightened reality, but they keep one foot on the ground. Yes, we’ve got vampires and (it’s implied) werewolves, but nobody’s tapping magic wands or vaporizing each other, and this was a smart move. It makes suspension of disbelief easy, and all Hardwicke and company had to do was watch the “Bourne” movies and take some notes.
How they blew it: There’s no other way to say it: these are the worst constructed, worst executed action scenes I’ve ever seen from a film on this kind of budget. Edward’s super-fast running and jumping are the worst offenders, they hit you like a bucket of ice water. I fault the director almost exclusively for this, she should have looked at this crap and told somebody, “It’s not working.” Hollywood blockbusters may be lacking severely in many departments, but they’re at least supposed to take care of business on the technical end. To flunk this aspect of the film on top of everything else is just salt in the wound.
Also, not enough effort was put into defining the movement patterns of the vampires. Their visual cadence is uneven, inconsistent, and unconvincing. Sometimes they strut like supermodels, sometimes they crouch like wolverines, but there’s no emotional through line, no visual language employed to talk to us about these creatures. Do they like the strutting, or do they feel more content with their baser instincts? What parts of cultural norms do they misjudge, isolated as they are from the flow of a mortal life? These questions are dealt with using hollow dialogue, but I never believed their answers, because I wanted to see them for myself. The way it plays out, it looks more like the actors were forced to make up their poses as they went along, and the movie suffers for it.
4. The story. There was a great one here, and it should have been easy to pull off. Since a big part of the appeal is the “it could happen to you!” intimacy, the right choice was obviously a reserved, spartan camera style. Keep things feeling almost documentary like, keep the authenticity high. Most important of all, cast good people and trust them to make the longing gazes work; don’t try to edit your way into sexiness on the cutting room floor, just yank the camera back and let them do the work.
How they blew it: They managed not to do a single thing I suggested above. The movie feels surreal, like it could never happen to us, like it’s on a different planet. The authenticity is very low, with sappy music cutting in all the time to knock us on the head with an emotional cue we already received. And last but not least, they didn’t trust their lead actors, so the movie desperately elbows in on them when they’re trying to connect with us. Let me stress again that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are fine actors, have great chemistry, and were more than ready to step up to the plate and give us a home run. But every time they try to get a minute alone with their audience, Catherine Hardwicke butts her way onto the screen, nudges us and says, “This is the romantic scene now! I wasn’t sure if you were getting it!”
Do you see now what it was like to watch this movie? To gaze past the smoldering wreckage into the delicate morsel hidden beneath? Dear reader, it nearly brought a tear to my eye. I have rarely seen such an opportunity so wasted. The worst part is, I would swear to you that Hardwicke was the right choice for director; she has experience doing real movies about real teenagers, and she’s done a little action with “The Lords of Dogtown.” In all fairness, this was Summit Entertainment’s flagship, so maybe they put a leash around her neck and kept her from doing what she wanted; I could definitely smell the faint aroma of studio interference in a few scenes.
But even if that is the case, directors don’t get a pardon just because the going was tough. Taking that job means the buck stops with you; if the movie doesn’t work, you blew it. “Twilight” is a film whose proper execution was obvious, and the people entrusted to do it still managed to miss the mark. This is already sad enough, but when a genuinely compelling story is trashed in the process, then it’s something else entirely.
0 Responses to “Sigh…let’s just do this thing…”