Twilight: More a guilty pleasure than anything else

For weeks before the premiere of one of the year’s most anticipated films, there was no escaping the fandom of Twilight, a series that tells the age-old story of a dangerous vampire and the mortal girl who falls in love with him, even if you tried to. Tweens could be seen sporting t-shirts with the faces or names of the main characters; students on campus were spotted clutching the easily recognizable red-and-black bound books; and the trailers seemed to pervade television, movie theaters, and Internet sites. According to Fandango.com, the small movie production studio-made film raked in over $70 million dollars its opening weekend.From the uprooted and charmingly vulnerable Bella Swan (Into The Wild’s Kristen Stewart) to the brooding and devastatingly handsome Edward Cullen (Harry Potter series’ English thespian Robert Pattinson), the Twilight film did not disappoint die-hard fans of the four-volume book series written by Stephenie Meyer. The script left in straight-from-the-book lines like Bella’s epiphany of her feelings for someone who confessed to wanting to kill her: “There was a part of [Edward] that thirsted for my blood […] I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.” Unfortunately, it provides those who have not read the doorstops with some uneasiness and moments of unintended hilarity by the stars’ underwhelming acting and the dialogue’s sometimes seemingly sexual double entendres. Edward Cullen tells Bella Swan that they shouldn’t be friends because he doesn’t think he can control himself around her. The vampire is, of course, talking about the temptation of turning his new friend into a snack and nothing else. The film is rated PG-13, after all. It can be said, though, that what Stewart and Pattinson lack in selling their roles, they, thankfully, make up with undeniable chemistry. The film follows the main character’s journey from big, bright Phoenix, Arizona to small and dark Forks, Washington as she moves to a completely different high school right in the middle of her junior year. Bella is given an unrealistically warm welcome by her new high school classmates, each of them vying for the new girl’s attention. The only group of students who seem to be unfazed by the appearance of a new member to their school are the Cullens, a group of five criminally gorgeous yet ghostly pale teenagers all adopted by the town’s equally gorgeous young doctor and wife. Of course, the reason that they’re not interested is because they’re vampires. These immortals have no interest in the hundreds of warm-blooded humans around them because, as Edward so eloquently explains through Pattinson’s sometimes badly disguised accent, they are “vegetarians” and only prey on animals.The rest of the film is full of equal parts angst and romance, with the soundtrack consisting of appropriate dark and moody bands like Paramore and Muse. If someone is looking to relive the emotional upheaval that is reminiscent of high school years, Twilight is the film. If one were to be dragged to a screening of the film, be warned of shrieking teenage girls and take solace in the eye-candy that is the collectively attractive cast.