Rewatching Twilight

So it has been almost exactly 2 years since I've rewatched all the Twilight movies and they have seemed to make a resurgence on tiktok so I thought I’d join the fun. Now I would like to state that I read the books so much in middle school that my copy of New Moon fell apart at the binding. I also watched the midnight premiere of every single movie so as I document my experience rewatching these movies I don’t want to hear shit about how I’m not a real fan or whatever. I have the nostalgia attached to these films and guess what guys? They are still not good. Again, because I have said this so many times, you are allowed to like, love, enjoy anything you want but let's be honest with ourselves. Reality states that these movies are bad, and that’s okay. So here we go rewatching Twilight.

First of all the movies are very…blue. Not in an emotional or well directed way but they are literally tinted blue. It is the most boring and weird color grating and it instantly makes whatever you are watching worse. Like the weird red filter that went over all the hobbit movies, and the gray one that existed in the entirety of the first 3 seasons of Supernatural.

Then we of course have the very twisted native “representation” in these movies. It has been called out before but it deserves to be said again. Stephanie Meyer took actual tribal stories and traditions and butchered it to fit her story, not a good look coming from a white woman. She also said that vampires couldn’t be black and fought against the movie casting of Laurent…sorry but bad people have never produced truly good content. So strike 2.

The vampire “reveal” we all know which monologue I’m talking about here. Now we aren’t going to blame Kristen Stewart for the badness of this because nobody hates these movies more then the two leading actors but god damn that whole scene is so painful to watch. The dialogue sounds like it was written by a 5th grader who is writing their first story;

“You're impossibly fast, and strong. Your skin is pale white and ice cold. Your eyes change color, and sometimes you speak like – like you're from a different time. You never eat or drink anything. You don't go out in the sunlight. How old are you?”

And then of course we have the fact that these vampires aren’t like other vampires, no they’re different…they sparkle in the sunlight. This was Meyer’s desperate attempt to be different, to take a creature that has been used in media a thousand times over and be creative with it. Well she failed, because having them SPARKLE was quite possibly the dumbest shit she could have come up with. As someone who has literally spent years studying folklore and mythology the “vampires” in Twilight are much closer to fairies then they are vampires. Lore exists for a reason, you can not simply change something that’s existed since 1672 and call it the same thing. Not how this works. I can call my dog a vampire, doesn’t make her one.

I will say that my love for Alice is endless and will never die. She is beautiful and sweet and is totally fairy-like.

“You better hold on tight spider-monkey” guys come on, this dialogue is so bad.

Also we are supposed to believe they are in love but my two sweet babies have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever. There is no heat, no comfort, nothing between them that even vaguely indicates attraction.

The baseball scene is bad, but it's entertaining enough that I don’t really care.

Also on the list of characters that we love in the face of a bad story we have Charlie, an absolute gem of a human and a father.

This series also has just an obsession with the idea of hurting someone you care about “for their own good”, which is a wildly selfish concept first of all. But when Bella needs to leave and she tells Charlie the stuff that her mom told him when she was leaving him was actually so unnecessary.

I also want to point out that as adaptations go these movies were pretty accurate…which tells you what the quality of the books were.

ALSO the Cullens make a fuckton of dog jokes in the coming movies about Jacob and the rest of the wolves but we’ve got a vampire tracker that literally follows Bella’s scent in this first movie so ya know, who's really closer to being a pet?

New Moon starts with Bella just hating her birthday which is so stupid for numerous reasons but she’s really caught up on being a year “older” than Edward. Which opens up an intense conversation that I feel very strongly about and I will explore further in a different, vampire related article, but why do vampires always choose to go back to highschool? And date highschool girls? You’ve literally lived through wars, economic collapses, political uproars, and you have an insane amount of knowledge and you choose to date a child? Fucking weird and gross dude. It is exactly the same thing as a 45 year old dating an 18 year old…creepy and pedophilic.

I also love that later in the movie Jacob calls her out on her obsession with age.

The breakup in the woods scene is so ridiculously dramatic, all because clumsy ass Bella cut herself at her birthday party and the vampires all vampired out. I will say that Bella’s role in the drama was justified because she is a teenager, and they are all hormones and unregulated emotions. But there is really no excuse for Edward’s dramatics.

I will say the scene where we see Bella’s grief as the months pass was done very well. Simple yet very impactful and relatable. As someone who has dealt with depression the relentless numbness and repetition of everyday life is shown very well.

Bella starts doing dangerous shit because when she fears for her life she hallucinates Edward.

The depiction of the tribe as wolves is also wildly stupid. Meyer really just wanted to make them the direct opposite of vampires and it just came off as shallow and poorly thought out. Vampires are cold so werewolves are hot. Vampires don’t eat so the wolves must eat a lot. Again it's a very child-like driven mindset.

I know we make fun of it enough but the sheer amount that Taylor Lautner has his shirt off in these movies is absolutely ridiculous. The worst part of this is that the wolf transition could have been a really great allegory for puberty and growing up and Meyers just did fucking nothing with that.

The transition of Jake turning into a wolf to protect Bella is pretty dope though.

Okay, New Moon isn’t as bad as the first one, I love Kristen Stewart but imma blame both her acting and the direction for how absolutely terrible she was in this movie…and really the whole series. They had her be very jumpy, like all of her movements and acting choices were very scattered and sharp. It just looks like she’s going through drug withdrawals the whole series. I will say that the story is better in New Moon and there are way less cringy scenes compared to the first one. The fight scene with the Volturi however is so terrible.

This love triangle has also always been ridiculous to me, like even when I read the books because there is exactly nothing special or exciting about Bella. She is literally so boring. Her whole personality and the framing of this story is sooooooo pick me. She doesn’t like shopping, she’s not like other girls. And Kristen Stewart is very pretty but they really made her kind of dumpy in these movies with the shit ass fashion choices.

Well that gets us through New Moon, part two will take care of Eclipse and both parts of Breaking Dawn. It just seemed like a lot to do in one article. This rewatch did also spawn an in depth analysis of vampire media as a whole so stay tuned for that I guess.