I saw Twilight on television last night and decided to do this article just for the heck of it. I put myself in danger from hordes of Twi-hards out there by saying that movie isn’t one of my favorite chick flicks and actually counts as one of the films that ruined my good feelings for the literature. Several years after I’ve seen it in the big screen, suffice to say, my feelings remain unchanged.

While I would like to praise Twilight for its excellent casting choices, since the movie characters pretty much conform to the images of the characters presented in the book, I have a major problem with the acting of the film’s two lead characters — Bella and Edward. From the onset, I have noticed that the range of their acting is limited to lip biting, fidgeting, squirming and glaring at each other like they each had been constipated for several days. I do understand that Edward was supposed to be tamping down urges to feast on Bella’s blood but still, his interpretation of Edward’s pain was kind of weird. Don’t get me started on Bella, whose awkward stance and angsty demeanor was a huge turnoff.  The rest of the cast pulled their parts pretty well, but still, with the two leads being the center of most of the scenes, its hard to really achieve the same emotional investment as readers have for the book — even the act of watching the scenes without cringing or falling asleep is an achievement.

Perhaps, the filmmakers should not have dwelled on the lengthy dialogues that grow tedious after being said repeatedly, and instead did something different to liven up the scenes rather than leaving Edward and Bella to stare at each other for protracted periods of time while the camera pans around them and nothing significant really happens.

Other than that, Twilight had very strong cinematography and great framing for the scenes, especially at the mountaintop where the breathtaking scene of the forests of Forks serve as the background for the spidermonkey scene. Kudos also to the director to the nod to the book’s cover (lunchroom scene with the bouncing apple). What I liked best about the movie was the very cool soundtrack which truly appeals to the young viewers who lined up for hours to get tickets to this surprise blockbuster. And eye candy also runs aplenty in this movie as almost all of the cast members are quite gorgeous. What’s curious about Twilight is that no matter how much I’m not a fan of the movie, I have a strange fixation with it that I couldn’t stop watching it… perhaps because I am fascinated with dissecting the film and its appeal to its millions of fans, or because I was hoping that I was wrong at some point and it wasn’t as bad as I remembered. Go figure.