i’m a person whose wiring prevents her from going against the norm; if i see something become ridiculously popular i’m immediately wary of it, setting ridiculous standards for that “it” thing to pass.  

 

i know that it’s not a healthy way to go about things but it really is worth it most of the time.  if that particular thing does pass said standards then i’m a pleasantly surprised happy camper (hey, that’s what happened in lord of the rings trilogy).  

 

if people expect me to like something, chances are i’d end up hating it.  and vice versa.  if people expect me to hate something i’d usually end up liking it, with the lowered standards and all, i once again end up a pleasantly surprised happy camper that the thing didn’t suck as much.  

 

either way i end up a happy camper when things don’t go the way as planned.

 

that said, watching catherine hardwicke’s ‘twilight’ had been a weird experience for me.  a couple of friends who’ve already seen the movie ahead of me texted, swearing to God that i’d probably end up hating it when and if i do decide to see it.  and with those harmless little words, my mind had been set to like it.  hell, by the time the house lights in the theater dimmed down, i felt that familiar rush of nervousness come in waves.

 

kristen stewart, who played the heroine, was perfect.  she looked the part and actually gave some level of depth to the book’s two-dimensional character.  the film makers wisely left out that whole clumsiness trait, but even without the canonical flaw, stewart’s bella oddly still felt human.  

 

robert pattinson’s played edward cullen.  well, my biggest peeve was the fact that the twihards all started shrieking the moment he entered the frame.  sure, it’s not his fault but gah.  okay, i get it; he’s edward in the flesh, but geebus.  get a grip.  

 

i once read somewhere that pattinson actually had difficulty in playing this particular character, because the books lacked detail as to who exactly edward cullen was.  sure, he’s gorgeous, but what else is there?  i think this particular bump showed on screen.  most of the time he looked awkward, especially when he’s around bella.  i’m sure he meant to be some sort of brooding, emotionally tortured vampire, but it just came off wrong.  or maybe i was just distracted by the weird make up.  props for making the earnestness believable though, that’s a hard trick to pull off.

 

all in all the movie gave me a feeling of disjointedness, which i found shocking.  really, one would think that a simple, direct to the point story such as twilight would’ve been easy enough to translate on film.  i mean, it really didn’t have that much complications to work around with, i sort of expected a smoother ride. 

really, though, they only had to play up the two characters’ chemistry on screen and they’d have had it made.  and clearly, pattinson and stewart have chemistry.  

 

strangely enough, though, when the characters were indeed speaking with each other, the said chemistry disappears.  i personally blame the dialogue; it was broken and fragmented, leaving a lot of people (who haven’t read the book) go “??? what the eff are they going on about?” in the wake.  there are a lot of cheesy lines in the book, i admit, and i pity the person who holds the job of sifting through that mush pile, but really, s/he could’ve done a much better job.  the garble that ended up on the film made it seem like s/he just picked out all the cheesy lines and threw them inside a fish bowl and picked them out at random.

 

the action scenes were sort of cheesy, but hey, at least there were action scenes.  i know it’s not right to compare a movie to the boook, but come on.  having BOOK!bella sleep through most of the action just seems a tad lazy to me.  

 

i do, however, appreciate the film makers’ effort into trying to make a coherent plot out of the pathetic one they had in the book, by making it seem that the nomads were baddies who were really out for blood (and not just bella’s).  also, i happen to like charlie’s mustache.  he just seems more solid, both as a father and as a chief of police, with that thing on his face.  

 

the editing was great, they cut out all the unneeded mush and just relied on the actor’s capability to relay the emotions with their facial expressions in the many montages.  and thank GOD that the whole scene with the heart monitor was scrapped; it saved me from unnecessary eye strain from too much rolling of my eyes.  unfortunately they also scraped much of the other vampires’ back stories, which i found to be unfortunate, as a little background would’ve answered a lot of questions.  

 

the tight shots were effective though.  by focusing on two beautiful people’s faces a lot, you somehow manage to sit through lines like “you are my life now” and “you’re my own personal brand of heroine” unscathed.  

 

it took me a while to write this, because it takes me a while to digest emotions.  yeah, it’d been somewhat of a roller coaster ride for me because i was torn between just following that weird wiring and actually trying to make sense of what i saw.  i could’ve just liked it for what it was (and because people sort of expected me to hate it) but i couldn’t.  

 

if you’re going to see this movie though, do try to stay away from the pack of giggling girls in the theater; they’ll surely be bound to be a cause of distraction at some point.

 

rating: 6.0/10 because it lacked SPARKLE!