Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

The Twilight series has been so crazy popular that is was only a matter of time before a movie was made of it. I thoroughly expected to be disappointed by the movie version but ended up being pleasantly surprised (although I still encourage anyone who has not read the book to not rely only on the movie. The book is always better!).

The basic story (click here for the review and longer description of the book) is of the developing romance between Bella, a teen girl, and Edward, an incredibly hot vampire. Bella has moved to Forks, Washington, the rainiest town in the U.S., to live with her father. Edward is a student at Bella's new school (starting out as high school students allows Edward and his family to live in one place for a longer period of time). At first Edward seems to hate Bella, but it turns out that he just can't resist her good smelling blood. Bella ends up being welcomed by Edward's vampire family, who have a family policy of not getting their blood from humans but from animals. Unfortunately, and here is where the movie deviates from the book a bit, there is another coven of vampires that do prefer humans, and they are preying upon people in the Forks area. When they get a whiff of Bella, one of them decides he must have her. There is more to it than that, but I don't want to spoil the whole story.

It's an enjoyable movie on its own, but, for me, it was no substitute for the book. It didn't portray the level of angst and need that was in the book, but would probably be very hard to do anyway. Some of the special effects were not that great. Supposedly the next movie in the series has a much larger budget and therefore should have much better effects. The characters were not disappointing in their roles, although Bella looked like she was constantly cold and Edward's constant staring could be a little disconcerting. I guess both were supposed to be showing their intensity. I recommend seeing the movie and reading the book though reading the book is not required for enjoying the movie.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke; Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, and Peter Facinelli

Movie; 13+; Summit Entertainment, 2008