Falling in love is hard on the fangs

Twilight
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Let me address something right up front: I am not a 15-year-old girl. If I was, however, I think I would have enjoyed “Twilight” a lot more than I did.

I can make this assumption because I saw it on a Saturday afternoon with an audience comprised mostly of 15-year-old girls. They liked the movie. I could tell because they were squealing with delight.

There were groups of young girls convening in the lobby after the film. Some of them were clutching their tattered paperback copies of the “Twilight” books. Others were wearing “Twilight” T-shirts. And all they could talk about was how dreamy Edward was. Edward, if you didn’t know, is dreamy. Really dreamy. He’s also a vampire. Go figure.

He also has a penetrating stare—he can look straight through you and down into your soul—and he bewitches Bella (Kristen Stewart), the new girl in town. She thinks he’s intriguing because he avoids her gaze, says very few words and saves her life a couple of times. She also thinks he’s really, really dreamy.

Edward, played by Robert Pattinson, is in a “family” with a bunch of other vamps, but they’re vegetarians. They drink the blood of animals, not of humans, and they co-exist peacefully with mortals: Edward and his “brothers” and “sisters” all attend the same high school, and his father is the town doctor.

There’s a lot of manufactured sexual tension between Edward and Bella, all rendered very simplistically: She loves him; he loves her, too, but is afraid of the consequences of their relationship; she’s willing to become a vampire, too; he wouldn’t dream of killing her, even though he really, really wants to suck her blood.

Teen girls eat this stuff up. They seem to be so caught up in the film’s basic notion (that a dark, mysterious, handsome stranger will sweep them off their feet) that they fail to notice that these characters are so superficially drawn.

But what does it matter what I think? This film was not made for me, or for anyone else who is far removed from the “Twilight” universe. If you are in the target demographic at which “Twilight” has been pitched, you will love this movie. If you aren’t, the makers of this movie don’t care about you.

Grade: C

Note: There is a Swedish film currently playing in limited release called “Let the Right One In,” and it also concerns the blossoming friendship between a young mortal and a vampire. It is a masterpiece—inventive, darkly funny and disarmingly sweet. It is one of the very best films of 2008, infinitely more thoughtful than “Twilight.” My review for that film will be up shortly.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Written by Melissa Rosenberg. Based on the novel by Stephanie Meyer. Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Ashley Greene, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli and Cam Gigandet. PG-13; 122m.