Twilight (12A, 122 mins)
Stars: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Billy Burke, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Nikki Reed, Ashley Greene, Cam Gigandet, Edi Gathegi, Rachelle Lefevre
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
STEPHENIE MEYER’S best-selling Twilight novels, a series of teen fantasies in which vampires and mortals live side by side, have become one of the biggest publishing phenomena since Harry Potter.
In August this year, across the Atlantic, a high-profile midnight release for the fourth book in the saga, Breaking Dawn, resulted in an incredible 1.3m copies flying off shelves in the first 24 hours.
Needless to say, with such a sizeable and loyal fanbase, Catherine Hardwicke’s film, adapted for the screen by Melissa Rosenberg, was always going to be a licence to print money.
So it comes as a pleasant surprise that despite many flaws, including stilted dialogue and a generous grating of cheesiness, Twilight is an entertaining and sprightly romantic yarn.
The occasional zinging one-liner ("Your mood swings are giving me whiplash") compensates for gushing and terribly earnest declarations of love, which suggest some of the characters in Meyer’s imaginary life spend too such time with their noses in Mills & Boon.
Special effects are convincing without ever being dazzling and handsome leads Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson stare at one another with such intensity, it’s hard not to be swept up in their characters’ ill-fated romance.
The story centres on teenage misfit Bella Swan (Stewart), who moves to Forks, Washington, to live with her cop father, Charlie (Burke).
As the mysterious new girl at school, Bella soon makes friends, but the only person she wants to meet is alluring outsider Edward Cullen (Pattinson).
In the parking lot one day, Bella is almost killed in a freak traffic accident, only to be saved in the nick of time by Edward.
"Are you going to tell me how you stopped the van?" she asks him, referring to his superhuman strength.
"A rush of adrenaline," he offers. "You can Google it."
