After months of trying to escape it I was finally forced to watch the latest teen girl sensation Twilight. The film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's hit series of books was always going to be a success regardless of how good or bad the film was. The audience was always going to be there to see it and it was, the film was a smash hit raking in $382 million worldwide and the sequel is already in production. Personally though I hated it and this is why.

Story... Or lack thereof. A good film adaptation of a book or comic or anything will allow the viewer to understand the story and generally what the hell is going on even if they haven't read the book. After all these movies are expensive to make so they want to reach the most amount of people. Well I had no freaking idea what the hell was going on in Twilight. It mostly revolves around some ridiculously pale girl Bella who lives in Phoenix, Arizona PHOENIX FREAKING ARIZONA!!! The sun never goes away EVER!! How the hell is she so pale!! Maybe it's so she doesn't look out of place with the weird looking vampires she's going to want to sex? Anyway she moves away from Phoenix to live with her dad in small town Forks, Washington possibly the dreariest looking small town in America. Gloom seems to surround this small town most of the town. Anyway she goes to the local school and gets bombarded by this ridiculous group of people whose sole job is to inform her of the 'Cullens' the local weirdos who also happen to be the hotties, and the Vampires. From here on in it's a Mormon love story, filled with so much teenage angst it's not funny and reminded me of the Harry Potter Puppet Pals Wizard Angst spoof. Bella for some reason is the most amazing smelling piece of meat vampire Edward Cullen has ever smelt. Now normally the vampire would then EAT HER!!! But no he's a vampire vegetarian who only eats animals, how nice of him. So he gets all angsty and conflicted, Bella gets an orgasm face anytime the word boy is mentioned and they decide to date each other. She meets the rest of the ragtag vampire family who also want to eat her and becomes the focus of obsession for a rival vampire, a supposedly ruthless tracker James. That's about as much as I can be bothered telling you about the story, I only understood that much because I had someone who has seen the film a million times and read all the books explaining everything. The story just doesn't make any sense if you haven't read the books you can't grasp that these are a different form of vampire than you are use to because nothing explains that. Half the dialogue is about dieing and eating and can be down right depressing. Probably why it's so popular with the teenage girls of today, everyone loves a moody, conflicted love story about death right?

What it did Well... The town was gloomy but looked really good, your typical small town America setting. The forest they so often run in too was beautiful whilst the Cullens dressed really well and had an amazingly cool house. This is one of the mainstay vampire traits Meyer seems to embrace, Vampires are always wealthy, glamorous and well posh and snobby. Also Bella's dad was probably my favourite character because he was BELIEVABLE!! He acted like a dad who hadn't spent much time with his daughter and in my opinion some of the best scenes involved him, like when he's cleaning his guns and meets Edward for the first time "Bring him in" (cocks shotgun).

What it Didn't... Ok where do I start here. The Cullen family vampires looked ridiculous with their beyond pale skin, one of the guys looked like Edward Scissor Hands but didn't have the advantage of saying he was built by a mad scientist. Meyer just rips vampire lore to pieces, her vamps have no fangs but hiss when angered, no claws but maneuver their hands like they do and instead of dieing in sunlight they have diamond skin that jingles. What the hell!!! Diamond skin!!! I know the jingling wasn't in the book so why the hell add it in the film it was just weird. The special effects in this film were terrible. They reminded me of the 1994 Jim Carrey film The Mask except The Mask was actually good. Edward Cullen and the other vampires blur their way around the screen when ever they run or jump or break into girls houses so they can watch them sleep and 'Spider Monkey' Bella has to hang on for dear life. Spider Monkey, what the hell kind of nickname is that anyway? One lot of vampires seemed to glide and walk at the sametime. The fight scene actually wasn't too terrible but the baseball scene was ridiculous. Just why did they have to play baseball? I don't understand that scene at all. Hardwicke really disappointed me with her direction of this film. I loved Lords of Dogtown one of her prior films but in Twilight she really missed the mark. The camera angles, techniques and shots she chose in certain scenes were ridiculous. In one scene Edward and Bella are standing in a clearing, the camera pans round as they talk and instead of waiting a second longer for the pan to finish and end up infront of Bella there's a cut to infront of her, WHY!! In another scene shortly after the camera goes on a dutch tilt and takes in the scenery half way through a scene with Bella and Edward, it wasn't even angled at what they might be seeing it just seems to trail off and then forgets they are there as they appear tiny in the bottom corner. In another scene they are walking and talking and all of a sudden goes to a flashback of the day before, no reason why you and could only tell because of their clothes and then folds back into the present. I did not understand the reason for that flashback, the information given could have just as easily been relayed in the present scene. It was a flashback just for the sake of it. Probably my most hated scene though was when Edward was standing on some rocks and jumps literally a metre down in a display of his crazy blurred vampire awesomeness. Why did he do that? Why did they show that? It was like a five year old jumping from the curb to the road, random and stupid. He didn't need his vampire powers to do it, he could have done it normally but no he goes blurry vampire for it.

What it all Means... Obviously I'm not the target audience for this film at all. You seem to have to appreciate the books or the romance genre to get this film. The special effects and fight scenes seem thrown in their to make dragged along boyfriends feel ok about being there but the special effects are especially bad, a clear afterthought to the whole production. None of this matters though because the film was always going to be a success and clearly lots of 16 year old girls are going to be dieing to see the sequel. I give Twilight 4 sucks on a dead corpse out of 10.