Twilight: What Went Wrong

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Ok I admit it.  I ate up Stephanie Miller’s adolescent series like, well, an adolescent. They were hardly well written literature. And maybe part of me stuck with it to see if it would get better. And the last part of the 4th book did improve once the story’s focus was off of the melodramatic and pained relationship of Bella and Edward.

Despite all of this, the book was very detailed on character, setting etc.  Anyone making a movie should have zero problem creating the world right? Wrong! Somehow Hollywood managed to ruin something that should have been a no brainer. So how’d they screw it up?

Casting


This was their first and biggest mistake.  The director of the first movie actually had several critically acclaimed films under her belt. If anyone could bring this film to its feet it was her.  Unfortunately, she made a huge mistake in casting.  And don’t get me wrong, the actors (in other projects) have all been pretty good.  I don’t even think Kristen Stewart makes a bad Bella. She brought as much as she could to a weakly written 2-dimensional victimized character.  But I wanted heat and passion between her and Edward. And for some reason Robert Pattinson looked more like he was smelling rotted garbage or in excruciating pain whenever he was around Stewart. They had zero chemistry.  How they ended up dating in real life is a mystery.  Rosalie(a latino actress with bleached blonde hair?), Alice (she’s supposed to be short and pixie-like not 5’7) and Jasper round out the craptastic cast.  The only characters that remotely embodied their literary descriptions were Bella’s father and her plucky friend Jessica.

Direction

While the cast was sealed by the time the second director came on for the second film, I was hoping a new director meant a better film.  Alas, it wasn’t so.  While it was a welcome break from the saga of Bella/Edward to watch her with Jacob (hello chemistry), the film still had to weave its way back to the their predicament.  Part of me secretly wished Edward would walk out into the sun in all his sparkly glory and burst into flames.  But of course (SPOILER) he doesn’t. And with the subsequent films, the direction never seems to put anything real into the film.  The sadness and despair seems forced, the attraction seems false and the only thing exciting is the soundtrack.  Why wouldn’t the director(s) fix the obvious lack of relating in a natural way? It had to be obvious.  I almost wish Tim Burton would have given it a go. Or Tarantino. At least it would have been a visual delight. With more blood.

The Makeup


I can accept that the first film had a much smaller budget than the rest.  And that the vampires looked like they dumped their heads in flour (especially Rosalie) was probably due to lack of funds.  And the sparkling- well it was awful.  However, the second film had more money.  The art department should have stepped it up.  Instead, the vampires still looked awful.  And it stayed this way through the next two films.  I can only hope that the last film someone, anyone, said something.  I want my vampire to look like Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire or Gary Oldman in Dracula.  Is that too much to ask?

Lisa Coronado is a content writer for Custom Magnets.