Twilight is a beautiful, opiate-laced, sunshine-in-rain soaked ecstasy of a movie. It envelopes you in a blanket of sensuous aesthetic comfort and the cute and sweet personalities of high school days beauty. You can recline and sleep with eyes still open and dream wide awake the most wonderful rare of fantasies in an experience that is real in front of you. A story of a good vampire and a girl brought together in a small Washington state town high school who fall in love because only they understand each other, only these two can be right for each other, the film expresses what many outsiders and quiet people long for in their hidden hearts; a love that doesn’t care and is not dragged down by the dumbness and irrelevancy of the outside world and its trivialities but seeks the supreme experience of an otherwise unknown, mysterious, transcendent and sublime existence. The two lead actors, Kristen Stewart (playing Bella Swan) and Robert Pattinson (playing Edward Cullen), are wondrous to watch on the silver of the screen, especially Stewart, whose pale white skin, slight body, delicate face and vital expressions combine to be dreamily hypnotic and awe-inspiring. This is a vampire movie where there are good and bad vampires, vegetarian and carnivorous, that is, animal-hunting and human-hunting respectively, who have a relationship with the Earth like its natural-born peoples, like the Native American tribes in America, and live both in and outside of society. The worldly Indians tolerate them but are hostile to and watchful of even the good ones. And Edward’s family is only in the town of Forks temporarily for one human lifetime, before they must disappear and assume a new identity once again in another part of the world like all immortal vampires eventually must move on. This opening chapter of the Twilight book series presents the characters’ first challenge in the form of a band of renegade carnivorous vampires who are attacking Forks townspeople and eventually come upon the Cullen’s and target Edward and Bella. I have not read the books and I come to this saga completely as a novice who has only seen the movie, but from what I have seen here I am looking forward to the second installment of the series already in planning by talented female director Catherine Hardwicke, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg and original novelist Stephenie Meyer. Obviously Meyer has created some great material to work with, novels which should be engrossing to read if these movies are any indication. And the musical score and soundtrack of the movie, consisting of delicate guitar music, new wave and hard rock lend the atmosphere an otherworldly beauty. It’s a great thing that segments of Hollywood and the independents are finally targeting the young female audience with films geared to their passions. Twilight pulled in a top-15 all-time opening weekend gross this week, and teen age girls are going wild about seeing their beloved Twilight novel stories on the screen, but this film and its subject matter have a wider potential audience than just young women. This movie will appeal to anyone with fine taste from girls to boys to middle-age men and seniors. Yes, it’s that well done. And Twilight proves once again that truly great movies can be made for low budgets as long as movie making is treated as a serious art and you start with a great script.
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