Bella Swan has always been a little bit different, never caring about fitting in with the trendy girls at her Phoenix high school. When her mother re-marries and sends Bella to live with her father in the rainy little town of Forks, Washington, she doesn't expect much of anything to change. Then she meets the mysterious and dazzlingly beautiful Edward Cullen, a boy unlike any she's ever met. Edward is a vampire, but he doesn't have fangs and his family is unique in that they choose not to drink human blood. Intelligent and witty, Edward sees straight into Bella's soul. Soon, they are swept up in a passionate, thrilling and unorthodox romance. To Edward, Bella is what he has waited 90 years for, a soul mate. But the closer they get, the more Edward must struggle to resist the primal pull of her scent, which could send him into an uncontrollable frenzy. But what will Edward & Bella do when a clan of new vampires -- James, Laurent and Victoria who come to town and threaten to disrupt their way of life?

Turning a book into a movie has to be one of the hardest things in Hollywood, especially if it is a much beloved book like Twilight is for many. For me it was a different scenario, yes I have read the books but I wasn’t that emotionally attached to them like many of the series’ craze fan base is. And the reason I wasn’t very attached to them is I found the books a very mediocre read and somewhat boring. The books were way over hyped for me and not really quality reads as Stephanie Meyers really isn’t that great of an author and she only does one thing really well and that is to write emotions. So this may be sacrilegious for some but I found the movie a lot more enjoyable than the book. Granted the movie wasn’t some masterpiece that blew me away but it did interest me and entertain me and was of a much greater quality than the book. I was never truly riveted to my seat but all the same I was entertained and I enjoyed the movie.

The number one fault of the Twilight series books, and I dare any Twilight fan to disagree otherwise, is the pacing. Her books have horrible beyond horrible pacing. Its 400 pages of emotions and bleeding heart syndrome to lead up to 10 pages of action so she can say she is done with the book. Gotta end it somehow so lets throw together some poorly constructed action sequence and be done with it. That is where the movie is so much greater than the books and the reason it was so far more enjoyable is the pacing of the movie was vastly improved. The climax doesn’t all of a sudden come out of left field just so the book can end it actually slowly leads up to it. There is hints of a struggle, foreshadowing of the climax, not just some random event so the book has an ending place. It made the movie far more interesting and delightful.

Going into the movie by number one thought was curiosity. How were they going to turn this book of mostly thoughts and pining and bleeding heart syndrome into a movie that could encompass two hours and the solution was simple they wrote it some action. The book has little to no action until the very end so the movie deftly added some extra scenes a little more action and the movie was able to progress a lot faster and more smoothly. The FX was a little off on some of the action sequences. But for a series of books that just shot to stardom recently and with a much smaller budget then your normal tent pole movie I thought they did quite a fair job. Most of the action was added for the movies sake anyways so if the special effects were off a little that’s ok by me.

My number one complaint for the movie and this is something that could come up later if they continue to make the movies is I thought the movie was completely miscast. Stephanie Meyers takes tomes of pages in her books describing each character down to the smallest detail and the movie really didn’t follow that blueprint. Alice is way to tall as she hovered over Bella. Edward has a nice rugged masculinity to him but is not nearly the gorgeous creature Meyers probably spent a 1000 pages describing. Emmett is not nearly as foreboding as he should be. Rosalie is not nearly as pretty as she should be and Jasper just felt out of place. And Jacob a central character in the next three books never once felt like the Jacob I had read about. I do think they nailed Carlisle on the head though and Chief Swan while he didn’t seem to fit at first also seemed like another perfect fit. This is a problem that may arise as the characters grow in each of the subsquent books. Twilight really is only about Edward and Bella while the next three books deal a lot with the subcharacters. If I were to rate the book I would probably only give it two or maybe even two and a half stars but the movie rates much better in my opinion.

Grade: B