My Place in the Mania: 2008 was a huge year for the Twilight
franchise. The final book in the series released in August and the first film
premiered in November. I was 15 years old then and have spent my whole life in
Utah. If you know anything about the conservative Mormon-centric prevailing
attitudes in the state, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that all things Twilight
were a big deal here, with the ever-chivalrous and virginal Edward Cullen a
heartthrob that even Utah mothers could endorse. Practically every parking lot
had cars bearing vinyl quotes or Cullen crests - because this was also when
sticker-making kiosks in malls were all the rage - and licensed merchandise
abounded, as Hot Topic was partway through its shift from carrying everything
goth to selling merchandise for actual hot topics in pop culture.
Everyone I knew was hammering through the books. As my
English teacher's T.A., I had to record the series on so many students' reading
lists that I had all of the page amounts and Accelerated Reader levels
memorized. When the Breaking Dawn book came out, my mom and I went to
Walmart and bought it at midnight. I then stayed up and read the first of the
three designated parts of the novel because finding out how the honeymoon sex
went overrode my need for sleep. The Twilight film came out and my
fellow teens and I turned out in droves. Some of my opinions of it then stuck
with me, while some have changed over time, but watching it now as a
26-year-old with a Film degree and a knack for tearing movies apart, I was
surprised by how much I still enjoyed it, which brings us here to part one of a
Twilight Saga films retrospective.
The Story: Twilight is about 17-year-old Bella Swan
moving to rainy Forks, Washington and becoming romantically involved with
108-year-old vampire Edward Cullen and his very tall hair. Bella is immediately
special to Edward because her blood smells particularly good to him, and he
cannot read her mind as he can others'. She also attends high school, has a
warm, loving relationship with her father, plays baseball, and is almost killed
by a trio of cruel nomadic vampires in the weakest part of the plot.
The Characters: There are many times where Kristen Stewart
as Bella feels like she isn't doing any acting. She's twitchy and stammering
and awkward, and she can't ever keep her mouth closed. Yet by the end of the
series, the character has changed so much that I wonder how much of it was
intentional. Stewart can pull off very confident characters including an older
Bella as the series progresses, so it's difficult to tell if the direction in
the first film was for her to be herself or if she was pushing the awkward
traits on purpose.
The other lead is Edward Cullen, as moodily embodied by
Robert Pattinson. His interactions with Bella are awkward on his end as well,
and some of his line readings are outright odd. Sometimes he seems very suave
but he more often sounds like he's in the grips of an existential crisis. I
tend to think Pattinson was leaning into the angst but it makes the character
hard to appreciate as some great catch. It doesn't help that he looks like he's
wearing lipstick, his eyebrows are way too groomed and shaped, and his 5
o'clock shadow is constantly visible through his pale makeup. He's a handsome
man, but the makeup is not doing him any favors and he looks far better when he
looks more normal in the Breaking Dawn films.
As an aside, this movie is extremely faithful to the
books' writing, to a fault, with a lot of the lines coming straight from the
novel. It isn't as stilted in Bella's narration because narration gets a bit
more leeway with an audience to sound flowery. However, some of the iconic
lines like "you are exactly my brand of heroin" and the "lion
fell in love with the lamb" exchange seem wildly out of place with the
more natural dialogue in other scenes.
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| LtR: Jasper Hale, Alice Cullen, Emmett Cullen, Rosalie Hale, Edward Cullen |
The Cullen and Hale family is deliberately designed to stand
out. They're all wearing pale makeup and gold or black colored contacts, but
more subtly they dress in cool tones of blue, grey, and white in contrast with
the other high school students who are in mainly earth tones. Bella wears a lot
of green, adding more grey as she spends time with the vampires, and finally
wearing a royal blue dress to the prom. She is still brighter than the Cullens
and Hales, but she has now adopted the blue.
Although the film has vampires and eventually shifts into a
full-blown supernatural romance, the high school scenes are surprisingly
accurate and the supporting characters look and act like genuine high school
students. They're loud and immature, and they're dressed like normal people,
not rich models. This is something that stops the film from looking overly
dated. No one is dressed in fad-type fashion, and the clothes could have easily
fit into any time in the last twenty years. We are also introduced to Jacob
Black, but we'll delve into that later.
James, Victoria, and Laurent are the villains of the
piece, roving vampires who are terrorizing Forks. This is the B-plot for much
of the film as Bella's dad Charlie - a wonderfully relatable performance from
Billy Burke - is the cop investigating the murders. The good and bad vampires
meeting sets off the climax of the film, with James eventually being killed by
the Cullen clan. His mate Victoria returns as a threat in the next two films.
The three of them wear clothes from their victims and while this seems sinister
on paper, it looks a bit ridiculous in practice. In particular, James's
low-rise jeans and ratty ponytail do nothing to make him appear scary, and
adding a too-short jacket to the ensemble only makes it worse.
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| LtR: James, Laurent, Victoria |
Visual Style: Twilight is the world-building initial
entry, so there are a lot of points being made and enforced. Forks is rainy and
damp all the time, so director Catherine Hardwicke chose to color grade the
movie to look somewhat grey-blue the whole time. It adds atmosphere, but it
makes the vampire makeup look even stranger, and the lush forests don't look as
green as they should. The color grading
is also used as a cheat so it isn't sunny enough on the vampires to make them
sparkle. However, this concept was abandoned in the other movies and they only
shine when in very bright sunlight so the whole movie doesn't look like it's
being watched through IMAX theater glasses.
There are also two scenes where the light sources are
obviously unnatural. Edward plays Bella the lullaby he wrote for her on a piano
that is in a room we have no context for and never see again, with
floodlight-levels of whiteness beaming in, yet it isn't supposed to be sun or
Edward would be sparkling away. And then in the final fight, which takes place
in a closed ballet studio at night, bright white light is again streaming in
for no apparent reason.
It's clearly established about a third of the way through
that Edward is a vampire, and then Bella spends a wholly unnecessary scene
Googling vampires, and then the pair have their much-parodied scene in the
woods where he reveals himself as super and sparkly. What should remain a two-shot of the conversation is over-edited with a circling camera and then a
shuddering sweeping Dutch angle shot. In the next scene, as Edward tells Bella
his parents' stories, they're outside and it isn't raining, then it is raining
and they're sitting under leaves with only him getting rained on, then they've
moved again and it's not raining anymore. This is all meant to be one
continuous conversation. And then he abruptly walks away, before performing a
very blurry super-jump that Bella doesn't react to.
The trouble with the vampire effects in this entry is that
they look incredibly silly most of the time. Bella stands looking around at
Edward as he leaps around off-screen with an accompanying whooshing sound
effect, and then he falls from the sky and yells how fast he is, and it's
unintentional hilarity. I would say there were definite budget issues that led
to a lot of the super speed being regular footage sped up and cheap effects
like that. When the vampire clans do meet up - at a ridiculous baseball game
that is part of the book plot and not to be discussed here - they all hiss at
each other. This bizarre cat-like quality is never seen again in the series.
There was certainly a lot of experimentation with the
VFX and vampire behavior here, but there's a reason most of the techniques
changed in the later movies. This is also an issue with staying too close to
the book when something isn't going to translate well. A romantic talk in the
top of a massive tree is picturesque; watching a stunt-Edward climb a tree
while barely touching it and with a puppet-Bella on his back, is goofy.
The Music: This is the only movie in the
franchise where most of the songs were not written expressly for it.
"Decode" by Paramore was the big single and there were a few other
new contributions including a Mutemath track and two songs performed by Robert
Pattinson. Carter Burwell composed a score that is often fairly minimal and
piano-led but which does ramp up with heavy strings and drums when the tension
mounts. Bella's Lullaby as performed by Edward in the film remained the most
iconic piece of music throughout the series, and Burwell would return to score
both parts of Breaking Dawn.
In many ways, Twilight feels like two
films cobbled together. One part is a very well-made study of a high school
student moving to a new town and falling in love with a mysterious man. The
other part - where the vampires are flitting about and wire-working their way
into rooms - doesn't hold up nearly as well, and lends an unintended amount of
kitsch to the proceedings. Still, as a very indie-feeling first installment to
what would explode into a yearly blockbuster franchise, the film succeeds in
setting up an engrossing world. The world ends up looking very different as
different directors come in, but Twilight has that strong initial hook
based around Bella and Edward, and their awkward yet undeniable chemistry.
