2 Hours I NEED Back

I read the first book (Twilight) in Stephanie Meyer's series about a teenage girl (Bella) who relocates to a small Washington town and falls in love with a vampire (Edward). I actually enjoyed the book, some parts needed to be skipped due to my inability to relate to the emotions of a 16 year-old girl, but it was interesting enough to invite me into the second book of a four part series. Having read Twilight also helped ease the reluctance I had of seeing the adaptation to the big screen (trailers released months ago made me uneasy - cheap looking special effects, cheesy one-liners...you get the point).

Off we go last night to a Friday night with some other couples to plunge into the cinema which felt more like a high school hallway after 3rd period. The film had 2 positives 1) Being able to visualize characters from the film, putting some faces with the names and 2) Bella: Kristen Stewart is either a great actress or was surrounded by so many terrible ones that she came out looking like a superstar. That's it, the rest is bad, bad, bad.

Let it begin: the logo was terrible. I don't like the spiraling 'g', it looks like a cheap etch-a-sketch drawing. I can appreciate the difficulty that accompanies bringing an extremely popular book to the movie screen, but they overkilled the loyalty to the roots. The film moved very quickly, I guess I should be thankful, and only developed what was necessary to tell the story and crutched the movie on voice overs by the lead character, Bella (this was also done because the acting was terrible).

Speaking of acting, Edward (Robert Pattinson) was described as confident and "cool", but came off as a wuss. Instead portraying the vampire who was in agony by the presence and proceeding craving of our female lead, Pattinson portrayed Edward like a constipated dimwit. It was as if the director took the first shot of every scene. A financially sound decision knowing that the movie will rake in millions on sheer hype so rather than exhaust the allotted budget, let's cut the corners and increase our profits - "Great scene Robert!". The special effects were grotesque, climbing trees like an ant on crack, gosh - with as much green as the studio was projecting you would've thought they could recruit Industrial Light and Magic for some help. Instead they spent their money on ariel shots from the local helicopter tours (see opening credits and scene where Edward takes Bella up to the top of the trees).

I am sad for fans because some will camouflage the reality of a film that should have gone straight to DVD. I won't waste anymore time on this 1.5 out of 5...BLAH! Read the book, ignore the film until it hits your Comcast On Demand 'Free Movie' section.