Book vs. Movie: Twilight
By Russ Bickerstaff
November 24, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Film.
Twilight
In Stephenie Meyer's hugely successful novel, a teenaged girl from Arizona falls in love with a 100-year-old vampire in the Pacific Northwest. Having sold millions of copies worldwide, Meyer's Twilight has birthed a string of best-selling sequels. With wide-ranging appeal, staggering commercial success and a story with an irrepressibly visual dynamic, it's a natural box office success. Amidst all the recent hype, it may be kind of easy to forget that the novel is only three-years-old. The dream that inspired Meyer to write the novel only happened half a decade ago. Still in their infancy, will film and novel be completely forgotten by the end of the next decade and how exactly do they compare?
The Book
The first novel by Mormon housewife Stephenie Meyer, Twilight was inspired by a dream she had of a woman and a vampire on June 2, 2003. She wrote the dream down and, in spite of very little previous writing experience, promptly turned it into a rather lengthy novel. The novel tells the story of a high school girl named Bella Swan, who is prompted to move away from her native Phoenix, Arizona to live with her father - the chief of police for the tiny town of Forks, Washington.
The very earliest portions of the novel read like traditional juvenile fiction about a new girl in town who has moved from a big, populous, bright and sunny place to a small, rural town perpetually shrouded in rain. This part of the novel carries itself quite well as Meyer's literary voice is not unwelcoming, emanating as it does from Bella's first person perspective. One can tell that Meyer has a love for the language even if everything present here is lacking in the kind of conversational poetry present in the work of a more inspired, more accomplished author.
The novel shifts gears as Bella becomes attracted to Edward Cullen - an eerily beautiful kid in her school who seems to be just a bit more independent and sophisticated than the rest of the students at Forks High School. Her interest in Edward increases as he saves her from certain death in the high school parking lot. It's a long and nuanced romance that builds between Edward and Bella as she slowly comes to understand that he is a 100-year-old vampire who belongs to a family of socially altruistic bloodsuckers who refuse to feast on humans, preferring the blood of wild animals. In Meyer's world, the bright light of direct sunlight doesn't destroy a vampire - it merely makes their skin radiant, thus giving them away as being other than human. It is for this reason that Edward's group of vampires lives in one of the cloudiest places in North America.
Edward is torn by his love for Bella and his desire for her blood. Here's where the book stretches credibility a bit for anyone familiar with the vampire subgenre - Edward is 100-years-old and familiar with all of those passions that a vampire would be familiar with over the course of a life that has spanned a full century - but he's never fallen in love before, which makes his love for her all the more intense. The book tenuously explains this along with some of the questions of how a romantic relationship could work out between the two of them. Much of this is due to Edward's overwhelmingly conservative restraint from traditional vampire activity and the fact that hers is the one mind he can't read. (Oh, yeah - he's psychic.) As tenuous as it seems, the connection between Bella and Edward seems pretty firmly established by the end of the book.
As the relationship between Edward and Bella solidifies, he introduces her to the rest of his vampire family and the novel switches into a third phase heavily steeped in Meyer's particular flavor of vampire fiction. Mixing vampires with superheroes, Meyer establishes that each one has a different supernatural ability - whereas Edward can read minds, there are those who can create a supernatural calm in humans, those who can see the future and so on. Of course, all of them have superhuman strength, agility and speed, which is illustrated in a game of baseball played by the family to Bella's amazement. During the game, Edward, Bella and company run into a group of vampires with a more traditional diet. One of them takes a liking to Bella's blood, setting up the big final climax - a game of cat and mouse between the good vampires and the evil hunter.
Suffice it to say, this isn't terribly deep stuff. The episodic format of the story and its open-ended plot make it really apparent that Meyer isn't writing this to make a statement or even really tell a story. Like most episodic fiction, Twilight is there to allow author and reader an opportunity to hang out with a few somewhat fantastic characters without all of that tedious mucking about with directly interacting with the people in question. For the right kind of person (and there are several million of them worldwide) this is a fun, romantic, dreamlike fugue.
The Movie
Turning a genre novel with a huge cult following into a big budget feature film has got to be a daunting experience for any filmmaker. Responding to this stress, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg is rumored to have written the script in six weeks, turning out something remarkably comprehensive in only a month and a half. Rosenberg's script judiciously transforms some 110,000 words in the novel into two hours onscreen under the direction of Catherine Hardwicke. Hardwicke, who started out as a production designer, has helmed three films prior to this, most notably her directorial debut Thirteen in 2006. After opening night, there is no question that Twilight will stand as her greatest commercial success thus far.
Filmed largely in Oregon and Washington state, Hardwicke and company capture some of the authentic, beautiful murkiness of that section of the country. Placed in the middle of all that natural scenery is Kristen Stewart in the role of Bella. Clocking-in at roughly 18 years of age, Stewart was roughly the right age to play a high school senior during principal photography. The value of this cannot be overstated, as the character is the emotional center of the story and to have her played by someone of college age would feel woefully out of place. Stewart's performance is intelligent and visceral - by far the best aspect of the film. It's too bad she couldn't save it from its many flaws.
Perhaps the biggest single flaw in the entire film is 21-year-old Robert Pattinson in the role of Edward Cullen. The British-born actor's self-taught American accent seems to be a bit too gruff and rough around the edges for a faithful portrayal of the character. Pattinson's portrayal lacks the refined, articulate, eloquence found in the book. Meyer describes one of those otherworldly types most of us remember from high school - the kind of surreal perfection that sits in the next row during biology class breathing different air than everyone else. Pattinson comes off less as a creature of extreme beauty and more as some sort of towering, perverted adult semi-gothic Eddie Munster who never managed to graduate from high school. It's a character he carries off quite well, but it's NOT Edward Cullen.
Further complicating things is the aforementioned script, which far too comprehensively covers the overall plot of the novel to be able to spend a satisfying amount of time on any one moment. The episodic nature of the novel is lost here, which is particularly disappointing as it relates to the romance at the center of the story. As stated before, the believability of the romance between Bella and Edward is somewhat tenuously rendered in a full-length novel. By limiting those romantic moments between the two that are there to help establish the connection between them, the film keeps the romance at the center of the story from being believable in any palpable way.
While the film fails as believable romance, it also fails as a memorable vampire film. The vampire effects are competently rendered for the film, but they aren't framed impressively enough to give them enough intensity to seem as dangerous or wonderful as they are meant to come across in the novel. Even the vampire baseball game, which is meant to emphasize their abilities, is presented here without any real love of the fantasy of the premise.
The Verdict
The film version of Twilight consistently fails to deliver on the novel's potential for visually dynamic cinema. Glossing over much of the interaction between the two leads, the script fails to deliver the emotional intensity of the romance at the heart of the story. Some of the scenes come across quite competently and Kirsten Stewart is exceedingly believable as the main character, but this doesn't go far enough to excuse the rest of the film's mediocrity. While it is destined to be a huge commercial success, the movie version of Twilight probably won't be remembered all that well once the inevitable series of films ends, probably somewhere around the mid-2010s.
The outlook isn't that good for the novel, either. The simplicity of marrying traditional juvenile romantic fiction with a modern vampire story is fun enough for the right people, but without much else to recommend it, Meyer's novel will probably fade out of popularity and join the legions of genre novels cluttering the shelves of used bookstores all over the country in a few years.
All of this being said, there is a strong enough fan base for this series that there will always be people who think of Edward and Bella as friends. As time progresses, the film may be just the introduction some people need to make the commitment to reading the entire series.