Dir: Catherine Hardwicke
Release Date: 2008
“ A kooky girl moves to a small town and falls for a boy who is hiding a dark secret - he is a vampire.”
At some point we were going to have to cover this film in some form on Bad Movie Cult and seeing as Ken has vowed never to watch it it fell to me to do the honours.
I'll start by saying I do not get this film franchise. Why do so many people love it?
The plot is a cliched story about high school love with nothing interesting to add to either that genre or the vampire one. The dialogue is a bad, unnatural sounding mess. No teenagers talk like this. The acting doesn't help. No human delivers lines the way the two leads do in this movie.
Straight off the bat we are introduced to Bella Swan played by the perma-scowling Kristen Stewart. She's upset because she has had to move in with her dad (the only good performance in the film courtesy of Billy Burke) because her mom has remarried and decided she doesn't want her daughter anymore and drops her with her old man. This somehow makes Kristen Stewart hate him it seems. She pretty much rolls her eyes when he mentions stuff like how her hair has gotten longer and sulks because a house with only the two of them living there has only one bathroom.
(Admittedly that is a bit odd as the house from the exterior shot is massive)
Get use to her being like this. She complains about anything and everything right the way through the film.
She arrives at school for her first day and for some weird reason everyone seems to know her. It's never explained why and there would be no chance anyone would care that a new kid started let alone run up to them all excited but that's exactly what happens. We meet Eric, an Asian kid with an awful hair cut who smiles way too much. He also says the word "Chillax" at one point.
Next she shows her total lack of natural sports talent by hitting some guy in the back of the head with a volley ball who turns and instantly knows who she is and her name to boot. This guy turns out to be called Mike Newton and he's annoying. Here he is acting like a dick in the cafeteria.
We also meet Jessica (played by Anna Kendrick) who not only knows Bella's name but where she moved from! Any more popular and people will be asking for her autograph.
Bella quickly makes new friends as you can see above and they all seem like totally normal kids (normal like any kids in these types of films which means nothing like actual teens)
It's here that we meet the Cullen family. They all look at least 25 years old. Pasty white and all dressed in white and light grey. They all come dancing and helpfully spaced out so as to allow Anna Kendrick to tell us a bit about them
Turns out they are the foster children of the local doctor and his wife who moved down from Alaska a few years ago.
We have:
Rosalie and Emmett - Both look in their thirties trying to pass off as teenagers, especially him. Everyone knows they are a couple and that's totally fine I guess.
Alice and Jasper - Jasper looks like he's shit himself.
And Finally.
Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) strolls in looking anaemic with the highest hair on record which seems to arrive 30 seconds before the rest of his body. Anna Kendrick explains to us how gorgeous he is as he walks past in slow motion.
Remember how all the girls at high school threw themselves at the pale goth kid?
No me neither. Anyway...
Bella attends her next class and considering she's spent the whole time complaining about the weather and how cold it is the classroom she walks into seems to have a massive fan on at full blast. I presume this is solely to show Edward reacting like he wanted to throw up after picking up her scent even though I'd bet money vampires don't need a massive blast of air to their face in order to pick up the scent of their prey. Seeing as this is a love story the fact it starts with him smelling her and nearly vomiting everywhere doesn't exactly set it up as a classic romance.
We then watch as they stare at each other for a very long time.
And Edward keeps doing this as the scene fades in and out to show the passage of time which means he has been staring at her for the whole class. Remember when the goth kid in school would pull girls by staring at them insanely all the way through the lesson? No me neither.
He runs out at the end of the lesson then doesn't show up for school for a few days.
You'd think from that she would get the hint and leave him alone. Maybe she would of if Edward didn't keep approaching her telling her to stay away from him constantly. How dangerous he is blah blah blah.
The stuff if anyone actually said to a girl they had just met at school would be ridiculed for it for the rest of their school lives but I guess its dark and attractive to Bella and Twilight fans?
Bella suspects something when Edward manages to run across the length of a busy school car park and stop a car from crashing in to her with his bare hands. For some reason only Bella sees this and the kids rushing over to help don't notice the dent his hand made in the side of the driver's door.
We then get a shot of Edward inside Bella's bedroom watching Bella sleep....yep. Just to let you know, Bella is 16 and Edward is *checks notes* over 100 years old....yep. What is it about paedophile vampires that girls find so sexy?
Speaking of his age. He's over 100 years old so why exactly is he or his family even in high school? Well Dom, I hear you say. They look like teenagers (debateable) so what else they going to do to stay undercover? So then does this mean they just go to high school every year forever? Once was bad enough! Wow, what a great way to make a vampire's like seem lame as fuck.
Skipping ahead for both my sake and yours, Bella finds out Edward and his family are vampires and he proves it by standing in the sunlight and showing his sparkly skin to her which actually just looks like he's just really sweaty. There's also multiple occasions where either him or other vampires are out in the day time and they're not sparkling just wearing sunglasses so not only is it a useless ability to have, is never explained and makes no sense. Why would a vampire need that? Thinking of a vampire as the ultimate killing machine designed purely to hunt why would prancing round looking like a human disco ball be in its evolutionary makeup? To top it all off its also unreliable! It doesn't even work half the time! useless.
Bella: (Upon seeing his sparkly/sweaty skin) You're beautiful.
Edward: [Scoffs] Beautiful...this is the skin of a KILLER, BELLA! I'm the world's most dangerous predator.
That's right. This gelled hair sporting, pale sparkly skinned "teenager" is the world's most dangerous predator. The above is actual dialogue by the way.
We then get some awful CGI of Edward running around the forest super fast to either scare or impress Bella I guess. I was cringing so much my face was practically a fist at this point.
Edward quickly gives in and they become boyfriend and girlfriend much to the astonishment and envy of everyone at school (???) he invites her to his house to meet his family and she comments on how light and spacious their house is. Edward laughs and says what did you expect? Coffins and dungeons and moats?
Well it would of made it at least a tiny bit more watchable if it did have those things but best just to laugh it off I guess. The family tell her how dangerous it is to have a human among them or some shit. Not sure they are that arsed if they allow Edward to just reveal their secret to any girl he's known for a week but there you go. The dad explains they are vegetarians because they only eat animals which makes me question his abilities as a doctor and off we go skipping ahead to probably the worst scene in the entire movie.
Even if Matt Bellamy killed a person that would be only the second worst thing he's done in his life right after allowing the filmmakers to use his band Muse's song Supermassive Black Hole in this horrible baseball-during-a-thunderstorm sequence.
See, because they're vampires they can hit a baseball REALLY hard. So hard in fact it sounds like thunder,,, so therefore....you know...they can only play when its...thunder...erm...Yeah I don't know just go with it.
There's lots of bad CGI to showcase the awful super quick running about and climbing trees when thankfully its cut short by some enemy vampires who turn up and they all hiss at each other like cats which looked and sounded ridiculous. One of the enemy vampires which I'm sure is the oldest one out of boyband Hansen, vows to kill Bella so Edward tells her to go into hiding so he can deal with him.
Bella is capture straight away by the Hanson reject who we find out is called James and is about to eat her when Edward jumps into the scene and starts fighting him. James bites Bella before he gets killed and burned by the doctor dad and the rest of the family who turn up.
Vampire dad inspects Bella's leg wound she got at some point. He tells us that her femoral artery has been severed. Now this is death. No two ways about it, Bella will surely bleed out in seconds and end the movie.
Thank god for that...see you guys next week for another review.
Hold on.
No it turns out she's fine. Phew!
We ignore the fact that her artery is totally severed and all it takes is for Edward to suck the vampire venom out of the wound (???) and for vampire doctor to apply a tourniquet to the leg using his daughters belt.
The end of the movie turns up thankfully and we see Bella and Edward at their prom. Interestingly their prom photo is taken as they enter the venue so they will have a line of other kids in the background of their photo. It also looks like its taking place in someone's garden with some fairy lights up. How lovely.
Bella's long time friend Taylor Lautner turns up sporting a long ridiculous wig he's worn throughout the film to tell her to break up with Edward. Turns out he's a werewolf. More about him in the next four films I guess.
Bella asks Edward to turn her into a vampire. He says no. They dance in a garden as Bella does her best robotic voiceover work to finally put we out of my misery.
Bella: No one will surrender tonight. But I wont give in. I know what I want.
Oh, fuck off Bella. And when you get there, fuck off again.
I hated this movie.
You might love it! If shiny vampires and moody teenagers sound like something right up your proverbial alley then the box set of all the films can be found HERE
FAVOURITE CHARACTER: No one. I hated everyone in this movie. Even the extras.
FAVOURITE MOMENT: When it finished. Or maybe before it started and I'd never seen this shit. I envy past me.
FAVOURITE LINE:
None whatsoever. No one says anything funny, witty or even remotely plausible in the whole 2hr 2min runtime
FAVOURITE DEATH: My own will to live.