Twilight in Hindsight

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. 

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.

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.