BEFORE: Yep, I'm here and I'm going to do this - I've been avoiding this franchise for years, but I saw an opportunity to work this franchise in, so I figured I had to take it. It became such a pop culture phenomenon over the last 12 years that there's just no use in avoiding it any longer. I tried to ignore it when these films were in active release, and now it almost seems like it's too late, but I guess not for me, instead it's become a bit of a hindrance that these films are so ingrained in the fabric of horror/fantasy films that it's a glaring omission on my record, and in my knowledge banks. So really, this is just to clear the decks and get this franchise off my "to-do list". But just in the watching and recording areas, watching the five "Twilight" films comes with some unique challenges for me.
For watching the films, the first question was - how? I noticed over a year ago that the whole series was streaming on Hulu, but then one time when I signed on, they were way down on the bottom of my list, which usually means that the films are no longer available - yet, for some reason, Hulu chooses not to remove a film from your list when it leaves the platform, like Netflix does. This is great if you want to keep track of films you didn't get around to viewing, but it can also create the illusion that those films are still available there, when they're not. So, between then and now, I saw that the whole series became available on Cable on Demand, so I rented them all for $2.99 or $3.99 each and dubbed them to DVD - which is still the most convenient way for me to keep and store films, but not the best way to watch them, because digital streaming is obviously better than a DVD that got burned from a VHS tape. So lo and behold, these films are back on Hulu, with better resolution and captions, so I'll probably watch them all that way. If the scenes are dark, like in "The Cabin in the Woods", my DVD player will not react well, and it will play back the scenes even darker, and I won't be able to tell what's happening.
Next problem, keeping track of the huge cast. As you'll see below, there were almost a dozen ways I could have gotten here, based on my 2020 viewing history. But since February and October are specialty months, I can only link horror movies together if someone in the cast was also in another horror movie - except I get one intro link and one outro link to the month's chain from non-horror films, that's just the way it goes. Hitting a five-film series like this makes linking incredibly easy, but then keeping track of a huge cast where some of the supporting actors weren't in every film is a different challenge - some actors were in three films, some in four, and some in five. I'll work all that out, but then anyone in three or more films usually makes my year-end breakdown list, so that's nearly the entire cast that will have to be contact-traced again in December. And any cast member in all five films who's also made a previous appearance or two in 2020 is going to instantly vault up to top-tier status for the year - not win the year outright, but 6 or 7 appearances right now is enough to make it to the Top 20. It's just a lot of work to keep it all straight, that's all I'm saying. But what the hell else do I have to do right now?
Also, in case I get franchise fatigue, I'll try to space these out - with only 24 films for the 31 days of October, I need to insert skip days, and it doesn't make sense to be more inactive as we get closer to Halloween. So I'll try to go slowly and just devote the whole week to this franchise, if I watch the last one next Saturday, five films in seven days, I can still stay on target. Jose Zuniga carries over from "The Dark Tower".
THE PLOT: Bella Swan moves to Forks and encounters Edward Cullen, a gorgeous boy with a secret.
AFTER: Sure, I've been warned away from these films, again and again - and as recently as last week by a co-worker. When even the fans of the films say, "You know they're...bad, right?" Eh, I've watched worse. Much worse, probably. I've probably watched worse vampire films, for that matter. Some of those "Dracula" sequels from the late 1930's, and the Hammer Studio films from the 1960's are just plain bad in a different way, they can be cheap and dumb - like, who the hell thought it was a good idea to kill Dracula every time? That really lessens the sequel chances, or forces a re-boot, or inspires the writers to keep coming up with more outlandish reasons why he was only "mostly dead" in the last film, and now he's back.
But so much of that old vampire lore is no longer applicable in modern times. Dracula may have been the "big bad" at one point, but now he's old hat. It used to be you could kill a vampire with sunlight, or a wooden stake through the heart, or running water, or by tricking him into eating the garlic bread when you take him out to the Olive Garden. Those days are gone - something shifted around the time of the Anne Rice novels like "Interview With a Vampire", I'll bet. Suddenly there was a whole underground vampire society, men and women who just worked the night shift and hid almost in plain sight, but were really apex predators who looked at all of human society the way that we humans look at a chicken coop or a herd of cows. Evilness is therefore subjective, because if vampires are just another species trying to eat and stay alive, then they don't want to kill all the humans, or else then they'll starve, or have to just eat really, really rare steaks.
Also, there's been a shift in fiction to treating vampirism as something more akin to a disease, spread by blood transmission, and I can't help but wonder if the AIDS crisis of the 1980's got sort of reflected in the mirror of horror fiction. If you share needles with someone, you could get sick, and if someone bites you, you could become a vampire, those don't seem too far off from each other. Now with a global virus pandemic still going, it's easier to draw a parallel between the spread of vampirism through sharing one bodily fluid with the transmission of Covid-19 through another. But that couldn't have been the intent of the "Twilight" series, unless they were referencing SARS or Ebola or whatever was going around back in 2008.
Yes, we have go back tonight, through the mists of time to a different election year, when Barack Obama beat John McCain, the Democrats maintained a majority in both houses of Congress, and the Summer Olympics were held in Beijing instead of postponed. The Golden Globes were cancelled, but it was due to a writer's strike, not a virus, and the biggest danger to kids at schools came from other kids with guns. Unemployment was high, and the U.S. economy was in trouble because of the sub-prime mortgage scandal, and only a few states had legalized same-sex marriage. (This was so long ago that I think Kristen Stewart was straight!). And it was a change to re-visit the rules of vampires, who previously could only come out at night, had to sleep in a coffin during the daytime, and then feast on people's blood until daybreak. But the "Twilight" series said, "What if they COULD walk around during the day, in a perenially cloudy Washington state? What if they just didn't sleep? And what if they only drank the blood of animals, not people?" Essentially, they've become just like vegetarian hipsters! And just like hipsters, these vampires are incredibly self-righteous about their lifestyle choices, and they look down on the vampires who didn't get the memo about not feasting on humans.
But really, not a lot happens here - or perhaps I should say, it takes a long time for the story to get moving, things don't really perk up until they get to the vampire stuff, and that's really only in the second half. So much time is wasted on Bella moving to Washington, trying to fit in, making a few friends, and then there's this dance with her biology lab partner over does he like her, and if so, why does he keep avoiding her, and really, this is all typical high-school movie teen drama, and it only has any deeper meaning if you go into the film with the advance knowledge of what Edward's all about. Which, of course I did, because I avoided the film for so long and heard everybody make references to it over the years.
Edward's part of this whole vampire clan, maybe it's more like a blended family because nobody's directly related to each other, but Dr. Cullen, the patriarch, must have turned these people over the years instead of outright killing them, and from what I remember about those Anne Rice books, that's supposedly a long, difficult, painful process, for both parties. They expand on that here, because while drinking human blood supposedly a frenzy comes over the vampire, and they don't want to stop - but only by stopping can they spare the life of their victim, and/or start the process of turning that victim into another vampire.
"Interview with the Vampire" also had a young girl character who got turned, and she was forever stuck in the body of a young girl, though I suppose she could have matured mentally, she stopped maturing physically. Edward and his "siblings" are sort of an extension of that, forever stuck in the form of moody teens. This is an improvement? Each one's been through high-school many times, apparently (umm, why? They're not going to learn anything new the 10th time...) and then the whole family will move again so they can start the charade again in a new city. Sorry, but high school was hellish enough the first time through for most people, why wouldn't they just say they were home-schooled so they wouldn't have to go through that again? Jesus, at least get them some doctor's notes that says they're anemic, so they don't have to take P.E. again...
But the family does like to play baseball, at least their version of it (must be all the bats...) and they can only play during a thunderstorm, but I for one didn't understand quite why. I must have missed something. But during the family game the Cullens are approached by three nomadic vampires, who've been feasting in the same town, and the two groups (bevies? covens?) of vamps have very different attitudes about morals and diets, so this leads to a throwdown. Finally, some action! One of the roaming vamps has his eye on Bella (again, I was unclear exactly WHY, maybe I missed something again...) and from that point, he would do anything to feast on her, despite the fact that she was under the protection of the Cullens. So the last part of the film is a vampire road trip to Phoenix, in order to keep Bella's father and friends safe, I guess, and a showdown between the Cullens and this rather rude rogue vampire.
I'm going through the IMDB trivia page now, and of course, I missed most of the in-jokes and references to the books, too. Just like with "The Dark Tower", that's the price I'm willing to pay when I watch the movies first and skip the books. It's just easier, you know? But now I have to go back and read about all the Easter eggs to find out what I missed. Most of this seemed like pretty tepid stuff, so my score will be right down the middle, I think. Hoping for much more action in the sequel films, but I may be hoping in vain. Still, for a film with a $37 million budget to take in more than $408 million worldwide, that's an impressive return on an investment. It's hard to argue with success, right?
Also starring Kristen Stewart (last seen in "Charlie's Angels"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The King"), Peter Facinelli (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Elizabeth Reaser (last seen in "Liberal Arts"), Ashley Greene (last seen in "Bombshell"), Kellan Lutz (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Nikki Reed (last seen in "Thirteen"), Sarah Clarke (ditto), Jackson Rathbone, Billy Burke (last seen in "Untraceable"), Cam Gigandet (last seen in "Burlesque"), Rachelle Lefevre (last seen in "White House Down"), Edi Gathegi (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Taylor Lautner (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Christian Serratos, Michael Welch, Anna Kendrick (last seen in "Drinking Buddies"), Gregory Tyree Boyce, Justin Chon, Solomon Trimble, Kristopher Hyatt, Gil Birmingham (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Matt Bushell, Ned Bellamy (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Ayanna Berkshire, Katie Powers, Trish Egan, Catherine Grimme, with a cameo from author Stephenie Meyer.
RATING: 5 out of 10 cans of Rainier beer
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