twilight

DVD rentalage got a bit confusing while I was on holiday, but one of the things I watched was twilight.

Obviously I, like everyone else, have heard all sorts about twilight. This has ranged from it being the worst abomination ever to the best thing since sliced bread. As you might expect, the reality is somewhere in between.

The film is an adaptation of a book that I understand is immensely popular with young women. I knew it was essentially about a young human girl and a vampire falling in love and that there has been a lot of talk that the whole thing is a gigantic allegory/metaphor for pre-marital chastity.

Clearly I'm not reviewing the book, so I can't really comment on that, but I would say those sentences pretty much sum up the film version. Girl meets vampire. Girl falls for vampire while vampire tries to reject her. Vampire caves, admitting the rejection was to protect her. Vampire has to save girl from other vampires.

I guess from that point of view the film works - you don't really ever doubt the characters motivations and their feelings are tangible and on the whole understandable and relatable.

I have to say though that from my point of view the whole thing did seem a bit daft. It also felt very long - the film has a two hour running time, but dawdles through most of it. It actually reminded me of a gawky teenager, shuffling its feet in the corner of the room at a family do, not quite knowing what to do with itself.

Also, if that teenage is dressed as a Goth - pale white skin, dyed black hair, black, ill-fitting clothes, then weirdly, that would match the film too. There's an odd artificiality to the look of the film - the images seem artificially de-saturated in an overly obvious way and while lots of the characters are perfectly normal people, they don't quite fit in the film.

It's almost like an exploration of a psychosis. The heroine Bella inhabits the real world, but she's also experiencing a series of fantasy-fulfilling delusions and visions involving Sebastian and his vampiric family. I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if it had been revealed at the end that Bella was experiencing some sort of breakdown.

And in a way that stylistic stuff and fantasy world thing worked better for me than the story itself, which I have to admit I found a little turgid and predictable.

As for the whole chastity allegory, it's certainly got a strong feel of that. I mean, vampires have always been wrapped up in sex, and so you can sort of understand it, but in a way it means they're like anti-vampires in twilight. To be frank, I personally don't think it works. Certainly there's absolutely no back-story or explanation as to why they're like that - introducing something like Angel from Buffy's soul would have helped no end.