Twilight Movie Review

Release Date: November 21st, 2008

Main Cast: Kristen Steward (Bella Swan), Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen), Billy Burke (Charlie Swan), Ashley Greene (Alice Cullen), Nikki Reed (Rosalie Hale), Jackson Rathbone (Jasper Hale), Kellan Lutz (Emmett Cullen), Peter Facinelli (Dr. Carlisle Cullen), Cam Gigandet (James), Taylor Lautner (Jacob Black)

Premise: Teenage girl falls in love with a teenage looking vampire.

My Twilight Review

My first experiences with Twilight were some WordPress themes that I found. They were dark and looked interesting, and up in one corner they had a beautiful graphic. There were three or four of them, and I was impressed. I later found out the images used were from the covers of the Twilight series of books.

When my wife pushed me into going to see Twilight at the local movie theatre, I wasn’t too interested in the idea, as I heard it was a vampire romance movie. But does a romantic vampire movie instantly mean crap? Surprisingly not! I was actually very surprised by Twilight, and while the story was a bit slow at times, and definitely a bit more juvenile than I would have liked, there were moments where I wanted to be one of the vampires in the movie.

The drawbacks of being a vampire in this movie universe include: being sparkly if sunlight hits you. That, so far, seems to be the only limitation they have. Not as bad as other stories including vampires where they have to worry about dying if the sunlight hits them, or garlic, stake through the heart, or worrying about crosses. No, in Twilight, you only have to worry about sun beams exposing you as a freak, and being ripped apart and burned.

The thing that fascinated me about this movie was how developed the secondary characters felt. While we were given an excessive amount of time focused on the two main characters, they still made time to let us into the world, and in a sense, build a universe. Most movies these days treat secondary characters as two dimensional units, only used to fill out parts of the story, rather than truly contribute. It definitely created a world that I could revisit in future movies.

Some of the effects in the movie felt like they were a decade old, but the way the whole movie was put together, I didn’t notice them as much as I probably would have otherwise. The location that they picked to film the movie reminded me of where I lived in British Columbia, and was very beautiful.

After watching the movie, my wife and I were excited to see the next movies, and were even tempted to read the books. There are very few movies that I ever come out of and want to read the book from, and it is even more rare for both my wife and I to enjoy a movie together.

While Twilight is definitely aimed at a female audience, it has enough interesting action scenes, fights, and set-ups to include guys in the entertainment. The women will swoon over the romantic aspects, and guys can enjoy the idea of being one of the vampires. It is a win-win for everyone that watches.

I give Twilight a 4.5 out of 5.

Other Details

It looks like the novels are doing quite well, and are expected to rank highly in sales lists for a long time to come. My wife is already ready to line up to buy the DVD when it comes out, and the second movie is ready to begin filming.

The second film will be entitled New Moon which has a tentative release date of November 20th, 2009, and is about the werewolves. A noticeable bit of foreshadowing occurs in the first movie regarding this. The actor in Twilight that was to play the main wolf was, Taylor Lautner, known as the character Jacob Black, but it looks like he might not be in the next movie, as they want someone with a bit more muscle definition. I think this is ridiculous, but we will see what happens.

Also, I think Ashley Greene is cute!

Tagged as: book, novels, review, twilight, vampire