Twilight: Review By jjmusichit

I, hesitantly, admit that I read Stephanie's Meyers's novel. Comparable to reality television, I knew they were bad and yet I couldn't put them down. She's a good story teller, but not a good author by any means.

The movie falls along the same lines as the book. Before I go off onto a tangent about how the movie was a disappiont let me clarify that there were good elements to the film.

Pattinson and Stewart are decent, up and coming actors. They have much to learn, but I feel they are taking the right steps to become up to par with some of hollywood's better actors.

On the opposite side, I felt like they didn't have enough chemistry. I think they can recover that with the second installment.

As for the filming, there were some raw moments that I thought were genuinely cool on screen. I liked most of the film save for a few choice parts, but the final scenes with the mirrors were decently done.

Now, the director of Twilight is also the director of the movie Thirteen, a gritty teenage drama. I think that she may not have been the best choice for this movie. Considering the story is a love story, I can imagine it was difficult for her to grasp the meaning of a love story when she's used to hard-hitting drama.

Therefore, the direction she took it was weird. The book is a funny, sarcastic love story with a bit of danger. She turned it into a dark, dramatic soap opera. The forest scene was not at all what I wanted out of the movie compared to the book. Following that, it seemed like any time something dramatic happened the sarcasm of the book was lacking. It just turned me off completely.

Now, I love the story, and that is one of the reason I wanted to see the movie-to see the story in live action. It seemed like everything of great importance in the book was merely glazed over in the movie. It seemed like Edward and Bella just suddenly fell in love. They didn't show much of a timeline. The same can be said for the James sub-plot. It was too quick.

I'm not going to lie, I knew it wasn't going to be an award winning film, but I just wished the film showed that the director and producers might have actually read the book. I did like most of it, but there were too many raised eye-brow moments for me to be satisfied.