Twilight (2008)

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in "Twilight."

After waiting seven years to watch “Twilight,” the question for the novice viewer is not what took so long, but rather, can one possibly endure the four more entries required to complete the series? The answer, much like the forbidden romance between the characters in this teen vampire saga based on books by Stephenie Meyer, is filled with expectation but tempered with hesitation and doubt.

The original actually works to a degree thanks to director Catherine Hardwicke, who does a good job establishing the ominous feel of the story through atmospheric visuals and a resolute sense of locale. She also knows something about teenage troubles, having directed the astonishing “Thirteen,” a haunting drama about a young girl’s harrowing slide towards self-destructive wildness and promiscuity.

Here, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is a morose teen from a broken home who has just moved away from her mother in Phoenix to the small town of Forks, Washington to live with her father. Removed from the sunny milieu of the desert, the eternally glum Bella seems right at home against the gray backdrop of the Pacific Northwest, with its weeping rains and interminably overcast skies, fittingly photographed by Hardwicke using dull hues and washed-out colors.

Bella’s world turns once she locks eyes with the similarly gloomy Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a mysterious, laconic classmate who just happens to be a 100-year-old vampire. They make an unusual couple. For some girls, Edward’s personality would be a deal breaker (“Your mood swings give me whiplash,” she says to him in one of the funnier lines), but no use splitting hairs when you’re already willing to overlook the fact that your new boyfriend is a product of the living dead.

If part of “Twilight” is about a fear of intimacy or teenage sex, the theme is neatly fulfilled by the trappings of the vampire story. Bella wants to get closer, but a kiss on the neck—or, ostensibly, any other exchange of bodily fluid—can easily lead to a bite, turning her into a plasma-lusting phantom. So Edward keeps his distance, sort of.

But this subtlety doesn’t last and as the film moves into its chaotic second half—away from the emotional shadings and slight nuance of the first—tired clichés and comic book action sequences take over. Hardwicke can handle emotional tension but loses a grip once the film descends into overt mayhem. The result is poorly staged and choppily edited fight scenes that look like something out of a bad video game.

As this chapter grinds to a close, a posse of sinister vampires would like nothing more than to plunge their teeth into the mortal flesh of Bella, who takes quite a beating as the rival undead clash in a violent flurry of shattered windows and flying bodies. The villains are anything but vanquished; after all, this is only the beginning.

Digging a bloodied shard of glass from her leg at one point, you wonder what exactly the willowy brunette Bella, who could do much better, sees in this morbid fugitive from a coffin. She could save herself—and us—a lot of anguish by just telling him to take his ashen face and perfectly coiffed hair for a long walk back to the cemetery.