by Helen Abbott

Created on: March 21, 2009

Sunday, 21 December 2008

Twilight the movie - the verdict

On Friday 19th December 2008 00:01am Twilight (2008: Hardwicke), the adaptation of the famous and riduculously popular book, was released in Britain. At 21:30pm that day I went to see the film. Here is my verdict, a Twilighter's verdict.

This blog will come to you in three parts:

The film

The book versus the film

The next film

1. The film

Let us ignore for a moment the fact that the film was an adaptation. What would I have made of it if I had never heard of or read the book? Stylistically, it was right up my ally. There were epic widescreen shots showing the beautiful yet rainy scenery of the Washington state scenery; cleverly placed voiceovers giving insight beyond the visual; a cast of super-sexy characters; a good mix of drama, action and romance; and a Muse song. All in all, I really enjoyed the film.

My favourite was probably the baseball scene. It was probably the most cinematic scene in the film. By this I mean the most spectacular, in-your-face, heart-pumping scene. The main reason for this is, of course, the use of Supermassive Black Hole by the fantastic Muse. Ignoring the film and the book completely I personally would be happy to sit in a massive room and just listen to Muse really loud (which I have done of course - I saw them live in 2003), but add in the visuals, which were cleverly edited to the music and for the first time showed the extent of the vampires' speed and strength, and we have a real winner.

The thing I felt the film lacked however was character and relationship development between Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Rob Pattinson). Now perhaps this is because I have read the books, but I felt, even for someone who knows nothing of the story might have felt a little let down by the screen time dedicated to the their relationship. I can understand that in a film you can't spend three hours showing the everyday goings on of a 'teenage' couple, but there was something missing. The chemistry was there, but I wanted it to be explored more... preferably with more kissing.

2. The book versus the film

Okay so now for the big section. As a Harry Potter fan I am used to separating film from book, treating them as two seperate texts, but of course, like any nerd, I also like conversations that last several hours about the differences between the book and the film. In such conversations, the book usually comes up tops, and Twilight is no different.

So firstly, I am going to think about characters.

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