The Weekly Albertan

Twilight is based on the bestselling novels by Stephanie Meyer, there are a total of four books in the series, and others include New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Down.

The story line follows the life of a 17 year old teenage girl who moves from Phoenix Arizona to a town called Forks Washington to live with her father.
Enrolls into a new high school, meets new people and unexpectedly falls in love with a vampire.

Jan Chen that has read all four books said, “Book was better than the movie, book was more in depth with the personality of the main and supporting characters. Furthermore the book is more about moral implications, right vs., wrong and good vs., evil. The movie made it out to be a chick flick.”

This book series came to be a huge sensation; it became a New York Times editor’s choice, Amazon best book of the decade…so far, teen people hot list pick and publisher’s weekly best book of the year.

Hollywood took notice on this successful phenomenon and decided to make it into a feature film.

There has been other book series that has been made into movies, others include; Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Children of the Corn, Hellraiser and the longest running  series James Bond.

However as the with every book is made, the dreaded saying of, “Book is always better than the movie,” statement.

As a result of this, director Catherine Hardwicke wanted Stephanie Meyer to be on the set to make certain the movie would be as close to the book as possible.

Twilight was released November 20, 2008 for midnight showings only and made an outstanding $7 million.

Over the weekend, it became number one at the box office pulling in $69,637,740 according to www.boxofficemojo.com.

In addition it broke other records such as the fifth biggest opening in the month of November surpassing the highly anticipated Quantum of Solace and Madagascar Escape 2 Africa, and biggest opening for a female director (Catherine Hardwicke).

In two weeks it has made $120 million.

When a movie makes that much money, sequels are always announced and actually New Moon was given the green light on the weekend Twilight was released.

Hollywood is known to make a slew of sequels even if they don’t know how it’s going to do at the box office.

Filming will start March 2009 and projected for a November 2009 release.

So it seems like it will be an annual event in November, just like Saw is to October.  

Review – Spoiler Alert

Twilight is not your ordinary love story, Bella (Kristen Stewart) falls in love with Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), only problem he’s a vampire.

This is an all round good movie because it has a real good flow to the story. However, in the first part of the movie, it seemed like all the characters were uncomfortable with each other and they couldn’t act.

The emotions weren’t there, felt bland and boring. There wasn’t much character development so it fell flat there. Bella felt like an emotional girl and Cullen was a creepy stalker guy.

It finally became interesting half way through the story when Bella and Cullen started to fall for each other. It started to tell the answers and explain more in depth of the characters.

Acting started to become more believable when they had the essence of love there.

Fight scene was pretty good between Cullen and James (Cam Gigandet). The emotion, the urge, protection and the lust to kill were ever so apparent in this scene. At least it showed that kill.

Cullen’s character had to fight the urge not to continue to bite Bella’s wrist or she would have died. His performance in this scene was brilliant.

Wish it showed more of the kills when the antagonist vampires were feasting.

Love has no boundaries as it was shown in this movie.

7/10