DIY Twilight
It took me two viewing sessions, but I finally managed to watch Twilight, the phenomenon. We’ll skip the most obvious questions like: how did this movie make money? How did it manage to gain even mediocre reviews? And why did I spend two hours of my life watching it? Let’s jump right to my other questions.
My biggest question first: Why, oh why in god’s name does it take fully 50 minutes of screen time before the vampire reveals that he’s-wait for it-a vampire? If anyone in the theater doesn’t know that before going in, and can’t divine that much before the fifteen minute mark based solely on the smooth-cool walks and perfect skin of the vampire clan, he doesn’t deserve to have his senses connected to his brain. Other random thoughts: Why does the camera wander all around the forest in the opening in what I can only assume was director Catherine Hardwicke’s homage to 2007’s appalling Blood and Chocolate? If the vampire is so goddamned cold, why can I see his breath just as well as I see the human’s? Why does it take the two lead characters so……long…..to say……everything? Why do we get voiceover? Does she say one internally insightful thing in any of it? Why are four drunk guys going to rape a 17-year-old girl in the early evening in a small Washington town? I had no idea the place bred bold rapists in clumps. Why are his eyebrows not trimmed? Why did I laugh out loud so often when the movie is clearly supposed to be so painfully serious? Why do we need flashbacks of wolves running through the forest when a character is talking about…wolves running through the forest? Why, when the vampires use their superjumping powers, do they fly in straight lines like they’re actually on wires? Why does the camera decide to spin around the two leads and jumpcut like a rap video during the big reveal? Is there supposed to be someone watching them? Where was Christian Slater? Why do they need to coordinate their baseball hits with the thunder? Haven’t they ever heard of rubber? What’s the drawback to being a vampire in this world? How did my poor Radiohead get involved in this? What can I possibly hope to add to the scores of negative reviews of this film with my own potshots?
To answer that last question, I’ll try to do something constructive and answer the others. We might also learn something about film design from a bad movie like this one. Let’s try to fix Twilight. It may still end up as an eleven-year-old girl’s wet dream, but maybe we can at least make it into a movie version of that dream. A lot of people have been telling me the acting is bad but the story is good. No. Well, the acting is bad, yes, but the story is bad too. Make no mistake though; this film is nothing but a sloppy cash-in from the script to the direction to the editing room. The story is one of the most poorly-structured and executed annoyances I’ve seen since House of the Dead. At least that movie didn’t take itself seriously, I don’t think. What people actually mean to say about this movie when they tell me that the story is good, is that the concept is good. The idea. A vampire and a human fall in love. Great. Great premise. Now, how do we put that idea into a film that isn’t…well, this one?
Let’s start with my first big compliant, the fifty minute exposition. I’m sure that when preteen girls are tackling the first pages of the novel they really dig the day-in-the-life pacing of a young girl moving to a small town to live with her dad for a year. I’m sure that puts them squarely in the middle of the fantasy, because we all know preteen girls fantasize about going to high school anyway. That’s actually fine, and I have no problem with this idea in theory. However, when you convert it into a movie, by minute twenty-five, those of us who haven’t read the book and really don’t care what it’s like to be in Bella’s position are already bored to tears. Why are we supposed to care? There’s nothing to latch onto. Bella’s a nice enough girl, but there’s no tension or friction or conflict to be found anywhere. Her dad’s sort of quiet but he’s a nice guy. Bella seems to be fine with the whole situation. There’s another boy that might have been set up as competition for Edward later, but he’s put out of the running in his first scene because he goes to a different school. So, we are forced to watch the same ‘welcome to our school; these are the cliques here and this is what you should do to stay afloat in our complicated teenage social life’ introductions that we have seen so many times before. We are forced to watch Bella go to class, meet people, talk to Edward, eat with her dad, talk to her mom on the phone, okay I’m bored just writing about it. I know there are a few other things that happen, but I’ll talk about how terrible those things are later in my paragraph on coincidences.
To better illustrate my point, let’s compare Twilight to another teenage superhero movie, Spider-Man (these are superheroes in Twilight, not vampires). Both are films about people in high school encountering superpowers. Granted, one is told from the perspective of the superhero, while the other sees things from the viewpoint of the person meeting the superhero, but the pacing and the introduction of elements should have been exactly the same. Now, I don’t want to get that formal with this write-up so I’m not going to actually pop the DVD in, but I’d be willing to bet that we are not more than fifteen minutes into Spider-Man before Peter Parker gets bitten by the spider and starts to discover that something unusual has happened. Now, think about that part for a moment. We have already been introduced to all the main characters, the uncle and aunt, Harry, Willem Dafoe, and Mary Jane. We already can tell something about this kid and how he fits into his high school. All we needed was (an estimated) fifteen minutes. Then we’re off to races, removing glasses, shooting webs, and fashion designing. And I can’t remember any voiceover during the opening. If it’s there, it’s really brief. It seems like Bella drones on like James Cameron at E3 throughout Twilight. And we don’t need it. We just don’t. Take all of it out, add maybe one or two lines of dialogue to clarify some things that would have been vague without it, and I think the movie would instantly be more magnetic with that change alone. So, to fix the beginning: ax the voiceover, and cut at least thirty minutes of boring high school life. That’s not where the meat of this movie lies, it just wastes our time and bores us.
Another facet of bad screenwriting shows up in the form of ridiculous coincidences or random events. I am willing to buy the vampire premise. A movie doesn’t have to be realistic. However, no matter how crazy the concept, it must not condescend my intelligence. Bella is standing next to her car in the school parking lot. Of course some crazy asshole careens into her with his car, smashing her into jelly-or would do anyway if not for the intervention of Edward and his superstrength. The driver was sober too, in the middle of the day. How often does something like that happen, really? If a kid squished another kid to death with his car in the parking lot of a middle class high school, it would be huge news. Bella’s later walking through a cozy-looking part of this really small northwestern town in the early evening (she is going to meet some friends for dinner, after all), and a group of four drunk middle-aged men start harassing her, and would presumably have had her in the wobbly H were it not for, again, Edward’s watchful protection. Really? How often does this happen? So, in the space of a very short time, Bella would have been dead and raped if she hadn’t happened to meet a vampire who instantly fell in love with her. Coincidences like these are what make people sit in the theater and say, “Wait a tic. I think I can actually see the writer’s pen right there on the screen. You see it? There’s so much garbage in the way, it’s hard to make out, but I think I see it between that aspirant rapist and Edward’s telepathy.” What could be more predictable and boring? It’s not like these events flow naturally from any other part of the story. Instead they rise up as randomly as-well, randomly. I haven’t written in so long my simile skills seem to have atrophied. I digress. I can just see Stephanie Meyer’s brain churning the cranks, “Oh, you know what should happen? He should save her from peril. What should I do? Oh, he should stop a moving car from smashing her!” Again, this is all fine in theory, but the execution is sloppy. Dress it up. Hide it so it seems plausible for Christ’s sake. Maybe she’s on a date with Edward. His car breaks down. They have to hoof it. The same bad section of road that broke Edward’s car sends someone else careening toward them. I don’t know. The author had years to think of these things. I just took two minutes. So the next thing we do to resuscitate this dismal story is to remove those pesky events that obviously fall from the heavens.
A few more quick things. Fix the acting. Well, I honestly can’t tell you whether the actors are good based on this movie because I get the feeling they were just told to stare at each other and speak slowly. This is supposed to convey the smoldering chemistry between them. I would have preferred some playful spunk. High school kids can be melodramatic at times (we all can), but they also laugh, unless they’re clinically depressed. They didn’t seem suicidal to me, just really, really boring. Since we’d obviously have to replace the director for many other reasons anyway, hopefully this problem would just go away on its own.
Finally, since we’ve cut at least a half an hour out of the intro, we can afford to spend more time on the poorly-developed chase sequence, which should have been the heart of the movie. A big vampire hunt where one clan defends the VIP and another attacks could have been a lot of fun. It could have been the cat and mouse of No Country for Old Men. Instead, we meet the villain at a baseball game, and we’re told instantly that we have to kill him because he’ll never stop hunting Bella and he’s really good. Then they go to a hotel and a dance hall, and it’s over. I know this movie is supposed to be a romance, but there is plenty of room to build romance into a long chase. Like a road movie. In fact, that’s better. It compresses the characters. Ugh.
Okay, so my version may not be a direct translation of the book, but I didn’t have to stray too far. Just pick and choose what to focus on and already you have an actual movie. Sometimes you can’t tell from looking at a screenplay whether something will be good, especially if they are trying something a bit bold or new. The worst part about Twilight, though, is that they should have seen most of these flaws right there on the page. Perhaps they’ll get more competent filmmakers for the next installments, but it will take a hell of a positive reception to get me to check out another of them.
To illustrate my point of how boring and predictable everything in this movie was, I’ll give you a ‘prediction’ for the following parts of the series. That Indian tribe is made up of werewolves. I promise, I haven’t read a single word of the novels or looked anything up. It’s just that fucking obvious.
In the end though, as I’ve hinted, picking on Twilight is like kicking the disabled. However, I hope we’ve accomplished something a little better today by theorizing treatment.