Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, and Peter Facinelli

You all know by now that I'm no huge Twilight fan.  I've made this clear time and time again in countless reviews.  That being said, the series will be concluding this month in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2.  The torture is almost over!  Out of what little respect I have for the franchise, I've decided to revisit the Twilight films.  With this in mind, there's no better place to start than with the film that started it all back in 2008, Twilight.

Now that her mother Renée (Sarah Clarke) is moving to Jacksonville to live with her new husband, a minor league baseball player, teen Isabella "Bella" Swan (Kristen Stewart) has decided to leave Phoenix behind and move in with her father Charlie (Billy Burke) in Forks, Washington.  New to the town, Bella quickly makes friends at her new high school including Jessica Stanley (Anna Kendrick) and Angela Weber (Christian Serratos).

Bella's new friends introduce her to the social scene and warn her about the Cullen family, a reclusive group of family members who have been adopted by parents Carlisle and Esme (Peter Facinelli and Elizabeth Reaser).  They tell her to steer clear of this family.  There's just one problem.  She quickly becomes enamored with the mysterious Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), who just happens to be her lab partner in biology.  When Edward does the impossible and miraculously saves her from getting hit by a van outside of school, Bella stumbles upon a dark secret about Edward and the Cullens that will forever change her life.

Twilight is a rather drab, low key film that does nothing to hold your attention when it really should be fighting for it.  The plot feels forced.  The acting is so-so.  The romance is non-existent.  With this in mind, director Catherine Hardwicke has put together a pretty boring affair based on the book by Stephenie Meyer.  In fact, it's a film that's only good for one thing, getting some shuteye.

Hardwicke has trouble stringing together a meaningful plot in Twilight.  There's a randomness to every major occurrence in the film that makes the film less coherent.  The best example of this is Tyler's (Gregory Tyree Boyce) car accident in the school parking lot.  In this moment, Bella's checking out Edward, and then a van is just speeding down the parking lot about to hit her.  The problem with this is that there's no context given to explain why the driver Tyler ends up in this precarious predicament in the first place.  There's an element of storytelling that's missing here, and it's something that's a characteristic of the movie as a whole.

If Hardwicke's direction isn't bad enough, we get the one-two punch of mediocre acting from Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.  Bella Swan is the character that has heralded a plague of crappy performances from Stewart.  I will never understand why people like her because she can't act and she has no sex appeal.   I have rarely seen actresses who deliver consistently revolting films.  In this first Twilight film, she is two things, unbelievably boring and annoying as hell.  Stewart gives us no reason whatsoever to give a damn about her character Bella.

For his part, Pattinson is such a sappy little vampire on screen.  He has certainly fallen far from his days as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire because he adds no value whatsoever as the aloof Edward Cullen.  I understand that he's supposed to add this mysterious presence to the film, but he's supposed to be mysterious in a way that makes the audience want to know more about his character.  In this respect, he fails miserably.

It doesn't help that Stewart and Pattinson have no chemistry on screen.  Their romance is more than just devoid of any emotion.  It genuinely makes me want to vomit.  Watching these two on screen is akin to watching a bad romance in a soap opera.  It's just that bad.  When Edward is hopping through trees with Bella on his back to get a panoramic view of Forks for example, we get a half-assed attempt at recreating that magic romantic scene we've seen a thousand times over with a variety of big screen titans and their leading ladies (e.g. Superman and Lois Lane, King Kong and Ann Darrow, Hulk and Betty Ross, etc.).  It's needless to say that this scene falls flat because of the stale romance between Stewart and Pattinson.  Given that Twilight is a big budget tent pole, we deserve so much better as moviegoers.