But equally as often, Twilight is so earnestly confident in its aesthetic that it's endearing. Bella Swan eats absolute shit off a motorcycle in New Moon and it's incredibly funny. It's like edging filtered through the lens of Mormonism by way of PG-13 supernatural horror, a description that makes no sense and is also objectively correct. The Twilight films move heaven and Earth to ensure these two aggressively weird characters would quite literally die to bang but, for one reason or another, cannot bang for as long as possible.
Stewart, meanwhile, is so good at playing a character who wants out of her own skin that people mistook it for genuine awkwardness. Robert Pattinson and Edward Cullen want so badly to show more passion than they are currently allowed to show. Pattinson's frustration is channeled into a character that is the target audience's pure, hormonal frustration Edward Cullen is 200+ post- Dracula years of vampire horniness bottled into a high school senior's body with no hope of release. The much-discussed disinterest of Pattinson and Stewart is, as it turns out, exactly how these two characters should be played. Every piece of dialogue from a main character in the Twilight saga is delivered like they are seconds away from violently climaxing or passing out from heat exhaustion. The Twilight films aren't as interested in coherency as they are in manufacturing an aching, yearning feeling in the audience.
I don't know if I "like" it or "hate" it, but I get it. Twilight demands to be seen in context, because almost every aspect of that context is wonderful and insane.īecause now that I've raced through all five films, I get it. But the surface details don't do justice to how genuinely, thrillingly weird Twilight is, both when it means to be and when it doesn't. You know about the general plot beats and the frenzied, devoted fandom you're aware the overall sparkliness of it all kind of ruined the vampire genre for a few years there you've heard Lautner developed roughly 8-10 new abs to keep his role, and that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart occasionally look like they would have loved to be fired in his place. Over the next decade, whatever parts of Twilight filtered in was purely through osmosis you learn the surface details of any major franchise just by existing. But that disinterest bled over to the film adaptations just three years later 2008 was for titles like Cloverfield, The Happening, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, films made by Big Cinematic Boys that all contributed to deep-seated trust issues. I was probably like, "how can I read a vampire book for girls when I have all this Korn to listen to?" Just a real little asshole. The first Twilight book didn't cross my radar because I was fourteen years old in 2005, and fourteen-year-old boys are famously incurious pieces of shit. RELATED: 7 Movies Like 'Twilight' to Watch More Supernatural, Swoon-Worthy Romance This is a report of what it's like to experience an entertainment behemoth completely divorced from the pop culture context that turned it into a juggernaut in the first place.
If you're here for an explanation, you've come to the wrong place. But with the entirety of Twilight recently arriving on Netflix, there will be scores of newcomers, like me, devouring the saga for the first time, learning ten years after the fact that one of the most successful book/film franchises in history contains a subplot wherein an adult man continuously asserts his intentions to one day be sensual life partners with a girl who is, at that moment, a tiny little baby. If you read the book in 2008 or saw the film in 2011 you know this happens, have kept that information in the sweatiest part of your brain for a decade.
This movie made $712 million worldwide-$500 million in just 12 days-and currently stands as the 50th highest-grossing film of all time, despite the fact that in its waning moments Taylor Lautner falls to his knees in romantic ecstasy after making mystical werewolf eye contact with a newborn. In the film The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, after two hours of moonlit vampire-on-human sex, Cronenbergian body horror, and Kellan Lutz just Lutz'in around in the background, a werewolf man falls in love with a baby.