Twilight

FILM

Twilight

Well, this is quite a curate’s egg. A thoughtful, character-driven high school movie about teens and vampires…. Oh no, just a minute, I forgot about Buffy.

To be fair, Twilight creates its own world and casts its own spell. Like Buffy, it bears little resemblance to earlier undead flicks. This isn’t a fangs and heaving cleavage type of film, it’s as much a love-across-the-divides movie as anything else.

Bella is an outsider, just moved from the sunshine of Arizona to the grey, rainy smalltown of Forks, Washington, and doesn’t seem that bothered about fitting in. But she’s one of the crowd compared to the enigmatic Cullen family, who are pale, arrogant and aloof. Turns out they’re vampires and she falls for Edward, the handsome, brooding one who seems to be wearing more slap than the Joker and would make a good replacement for Heath Ledger in the next Batman movie.

The vamps are super-strong, quicker than a cougar and remarkably restrained; Edward’s clan refrain from feasting on humans, choosing animals instead. They call this being vegetarian vampires, which seems somewhat bizarre. Anyway, they live in a stylish modernist house so no crumbling castle with cobwebbed crypts in this update.

For the first hour, as Bella discovers more and more about Edward and his family, Twilight is compelling and provides a thoughtful contrast to the average high school movie. It loses its way a little in the second half when peril comes in the form of a rival vampire clan who don’t follow the veggie vampire diet and have their eyes on Bella. It has to be said that the film’s climax is a little, well, un-climactic.

Nevertheless, Twilight is entertaining and bodes well as the first instalment of a franchise adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling series of books. There are no stakes, crucifixes or holy water in her vision of a modern vampyrism…

Fangs aren’t what they used to be, and that’s all for the good.