First Hit: The young teen girls in the theater cheered and swooned, the rest of us watched a mediocre story that was generally poorly acted.
Stephanie Myers wrote a book about a young girl falling in love with a vampire whose family only drinks animal blood (the vegetarians of vampires), not the blood of humans.
Kristen Stewart plays Bella the young girl having to move from Arizona to a small town in Washington State where her father lives. She is the new girl in school and becomes immediately attracted to one particular boy who is very pale and doesn’t come to school on sunny days.
The boy, Edward (played by Robert Patterson), hangs out with his family. His relatives all go to school together. They look and act a lot older than the rest of the high school kids which is mostly because they’ve been stuck at approximately age 17 for hundreds of years.
Edward is confused by and attracted to Bella because she is the only person whose mind he cannot read. She is fascinated by his shy reluctance, cute paleness, and brooding nature.
The film is about their trials and tribulations of becoming an accepted couple by their families and the community. Just as things start going well, a renegade trio of human blood sucking vampires come across Bella and would like to suck her blood. This, of course, leads to a fierce battle between two vampire types.
Stewart plays her character reasonably well as does Billy Burke who plays her quiet introverted policeman father. I didn’t think Patterson did much with his character except to look sullen, needy and wanting to be saved from his destiny. The story seemed haphazard and all over the place with filler stories trying to make this whole thing plausible. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed a very good Lords of Dogtown, did well to keep this thing on a track. I just don’t know if it was a poor story or a poor translation of the book.
Overall: There must be something about young girls wanting to save or fall in love with a vampire because the girls in the theater got off on this film. I think that a more interesting story would have been to explore the local Indians who made a deal with the vampires centuries ago. This was only briefly touched on a few times during the film.