Twilight opened in U.S. theaters on November 21, 2008, and went on to gross $412 million worldwide. Catherine Hardwicke directed it from a screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel. It runs 122 minutes and is the first film in The Twilight Saga. Critics were split. Audiences were not.
- Release date: November 21, 2008 (U.S.)
- Runtime: 122 minutes
- Worldwide gross: $412 million
- Director: Catherine Hardwicke
- Screenwriter: Melissa Rosenberg
- Based on: Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel
- Premiere: November 17, 2008, Mann Village Theater, Westwood, California
- DVD/Blu-ray: March 21, 2009
Trailer, via The Twilight Saga.
Bella Swan Leaves Phoenix for Forks
The setup is spare. Seventeen-year-old Bella Swan moves from Phoenix, Arizona, to Forks, a small town on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, to live with her father, Charlie, the town’s police chief. Her mother, Renée, has remarried Phil, a minor league baseball player.
At school, Bella is drawn to the Cullen siblings. She sits beside Edward Cullen in biology class, and he reacts to her with what looks like disgust. Kristen Stewart plays Bella with a stillness that could be shyness or could be nothing at all.
The Van in the Parking Lot
A van nearly hits Bella in the school parking lot. Edward crosses more than thirty feet in an instant, puts himself between her and the vehicle, and stops it with one hand. He will not explain. He tells her to stay away from him.
This is the strongest sequence in Twilight. The impact has weight, and for a moment the film lets you see what it is actually about: a predator wearing the face of a boyfriend. Then it spends the next hour reassuring Bella, and the audience, that he is safe.
Jacob Black and the Quileute Reservation
Jacob Black, a Native American teenager, lives with his father, Billy, on the Quileute Indian Reservation near Forks. He tells Bella about a long-standing animosity between the Cullens and the Quileutes. The Cullens are not allowed on the reservation. Taylor Lautner gives Jacob an easy warmth the rest of the cast could use more of.
Edward saves Bella a second time, from a gang. She does research, concludes he is a vampire, and he confirms it. He tells her that her scent was what drew him to her in biology class, and that his family drinks only animal blood. They fall in love. He brings her home to meet the others.
Carlisle Cullen and His Family
Carlisle Cullen, the patriarch, works as a doctor at the Forks Hospital. Esme is his wife. Alice, Jasper, Emmett and Rosalie are the couple’s informally adopted children. The family’s reaction to Bella is mixed. Some of the Cullens worry that bringing her close could expose what they are.
Peter Facinelli, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed, Kellan Lutz and Elizabeth Reaser fill these roles with very little to do. The film introduces six vampires and gives none of them a scene of their own.
James, Victoria and Laurent Arrive
Three nomadic vampires arrive: James, Victoria and Laurent. They are responsible for a series of deaths being investigated as animal attacks. Cam Gigandet plays James as a hunter with a specific interest in Bella. The final third of Twilight turns into a chase.
The chase is generic. A vampire tracks a girl through a ballet studio, and the staging offers no idea about what a vampire can do that a man with a knife cannot. Hardwicke, who has a real feel for teenage texture, directs the action with competence and nothing else.
How the Cast Was Chosen
The production history is more interesting than the film. Several actresses tested for Bella Swan, including Lily Collins and Jennifer Lawrence. Frances Bean Cobain turned down the chance to audition. Michelle Trachtenberg passed because of scheduling.
Hardwicke wanted Stewart, whom she had seen in Into the Wild, and made her the first choice. Stewart agreed to meet while working on Adventureland, so Hardwicke flew to Philadelphia with Jackson Rathbone for an informal screen test that, by the director’s account, captivated her.
Casting Edward took longer. Hardwicke could not find an actor otherworldly enough. Scott Eastwood and Josh Peck were among those who auditioned. Rathbone, Shiloh Fernandez, Ben Barnes and Robert Pattinson made the final four. Hardwicke did not pick Pattinson at first. He showed up at her house in Venice, Los Angeles, looking, in her words, “kind of wild-looking,” with “scraggly, black dyed hair, and a stain on his shirt.” Pattinson has described himself then as having a “hairless, chubby body” from months of “drinking beer all day.”
He won the part after an audition in which he kissed Stewart on Hardwicke’s bed and fell off it. Hardwicke said Stewart pushed for him: “Kristen was like, ‘It’s got to be Rob!’ She felt connected to him from the first moment. That electricity, or love at first sight, or whatever it is.” Hardwicke gave him the role on two conditions: he had to get in shape, and he had to understand that Stewart was 17 and underage.
Three Years at Paramount, 44 Days in Oregon
The project sat at Paramount Pictures’ MTV Films for about three years, where a version of the script that departed sharply from the novel was written. Summit Entertainment bought the rights once that development stalled. Rosenberg wrote a fresh adaptation just before the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike and aimed to stay faithful to the book.
Shooting began in March 2008 and wrapped in May after 44 days, all of it in Oregon. The premiere was held at the Mann Village Theater in Westwood, California, on November 17, 2008. The DVD and Blu-ray arrived on March 21, 2009, and the release became the year’s most purchased DVD.
What the Film Cannot Look At
The mood is the part that holds up. The Pacific Northwest is overcast, green and specific, and the blue-gray palette makes the vampires look like they belong in a damp small town instead of a castle. Stewart and Pattinson have a nervous physical charge in their early scenes that none of the sequels matched.
Everything around that charge is thin. The dialogue is flat. The middle sags. The Cullens’ powers get explained and then barely used. Bella has almost no relationships with anyone her own age.
The larger failure is what the movie won’t examine. Edward watches Bella sleep without her knowledge. He decides where she goes and who she sees. The film presents this as romance, and the one scene that could complicate it — the van, the hand, the impossible strength — is never returned to with any seriousness. Rosenberg stayed faithful to the novel, and the novel’s most troubling material survives the trip intact.
Twilight is a cultural event that is not a good film, and those two things do not cancel out. It launched a franchise and made two leads famous. It also handed its star a script with nothing to play and built a climax any thriller could have used.
The sequels had bigger budgets and less nerve. The one thing this film had was its casting, and it stumbled into that by accident.
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