Addopted from: ABS-CBN News Online
The movie has its moments. My favorite would definitely be the baseball match. The vampires play it so hard they can only do it during a thunderstorm. Imagine a vampire who can uproot a tree hit a baseball with the same strength. Bang! Imagine two vampires body slamming in victory.
It was exactly how I imagined the game when I was reading the book.
The movie is based on the phenomenal vampire romance book, the Twilight series, by Stephenie Meyer. It revolves around Bella Swan, played by Kristen Stewart, who falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen, played in the movie by Robert Pattinson.
It’s a story of passion and restraint. Edward and his family are no ordinary vampires. Calling themselves vegetarians, they’ve sworn to spare humans and instead feed themselves with animal blood.
The Book
Let me talk about the book first.
Decades of practice have trained the Cullens to become almost immune to the smell of human blood. Edward himself is about a century old, although he is frozen at 17. They have been so used to their lifestyle that they decided to enroll themselves in high school and mingle with humans. The Cullens are nostalgic about their human lives.
But what happens when after almost a century of his vampire existence, when he thought nothing would surprise him anymore, Edward smells the sweetest human blood.
In the Twilight world, the smell of human blood varies. On rare occasions, a lucky vampire would chance upon a human whose smell would satisfy him the most, like a “personal brand of heroine.” To Edward, that was Bella.
It was difficult enough to stop himself from killing Bella the first time she smelled her blood. When Edward succeeded to control his appetite for her blood, he falls in love with her, an emotion he felt for the first time in a century. First love.
Twilight, the first in the four books of the Twilight series, is an easy book to read. It captivates readers with the eternal suspense on how—and if—Edward can control himself around Bella. One mistake could kill her or turn her into a vampire. Both are unacceptable to Edward. He intends to keep Bella alive, blushing cheeks and pulsating heart. As if it’s not a big challenge already to protect Bella from himself, Edward also has to protect her from the other vampires. She knows the danger but she doesn’t care.
The Movie
Now, let’s go back to the movie. It must have lifted more than half of the dialogues from the book, and they knew which ones the book readers have come to memorize.
Bella starts the movie reciting lines from the book’s preface. “I’d never given much thought to how I would die…. Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved.”
And then later you hear Edward say, “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore.”
I watched the movie with my two sisters. Overall, my younger sister loved it. I felt shortchanged. My older sister, who also read the book, didn’t like it as much. I overheard a noisy group of teenagers debating among themselves after the movie. “The book is better,” shouted one. “The movie was really good,” shouted another.
Mixed Reviews
The mixed reviews of Twilight are not due to viewers’ taste or age. It depends on whether or not you’ve read the book, and, interestingly, how many times you’ve seen the movie.
My younger sister, Noella, hasn’t read the book. She swooned. I felt shortchanged watching her smile everytime Edward flashed his vampire grin. She watched the story unfold in fascination.
While watching the movie, I didn’t feel the emotions I felt when I read the book. While the lines were straight from the book, the descriptions and writings that made the book full of suspense were lost in the movie. The distorted timeline in the movie was disturbing, too. I spent a good time in the movie house watching other people, wondering if I was the only one who was not enjoying the movie.
I have a big problem with the vampires in general. Edward is supposed to be the perfect predator. In the book, he was someone who looked like he just came out of a magazine cover and he speaks like he’s from a different era.
In the movie, Edward seemed to me as human as Bella. He sometimes slouched and was at times unkempt. The other vampires were not as beautiful and as graceful as they are supposed to be, too.
There was also the eternal awkwardness between Stewart and Pattinson, although my younger sister said she didn’t notice it. It was like they were reciting lines from an amateur school play. The book is full of conversations. I’m not sure it was a good idea to lift too many dialogues from it. There were scenes in the movie where the lines were original, and I appreciated them.
No justice to author’s imagination
Later after the movie, my older sister Kath sympathized with me. She said it was exactly how she felt the first time she watched it. It seemed to her that the movie had a low budget. But she said she appreciated the movie better the second time she watched it.
While we were watching the movie, I remember how she spent her time pointing to my attention some interesting scenes. In one scene in the school cafeteria, when Bella was telling Edward about the trip to La Push beach, the Philippine flag was in the background. Author Stephenie Meyer also made a cameo in one of the scenes where Bella and his dad were having breakfast in a restaurant.
Like many movies based on popular books, the first Twilight movie failed to give justice to Stephenie Meyer’s imagination. But I have to say that this first movie in the Twilight series is more disappointing than the first Harry Potter movie. I read both books before they hit the movies.
Nevertheless, like the Harry Potter series, I hope that Twilight will be able to make up for its shortcomings in the next movies. Twilight will have three more.
I personally Greet Joyce Gomez and all khenethics reader's and Twilight fanatics out there!
0 comments:
Post a Comment