Saw Twilight over the weekend. It was better than syphilis.

I'm also pretty sure it was better than a couple of the movies in the previews, Bride Wars and Confessions of a Shopaholic, both of which made me sort of want to shoot someone in the face.

Twilight is frequently dull and pretty stupid, which is an unfortunate combination -- two strikes and its almost out. It didn't make me deeply, deeply angry, which was a plus. It has lovely scenery and an appealing cast. And some of the funny jokes are even intentional.
But, as a vampire movie, I just didn't like it. As a teen romance... well, I wouldn't have bothered to watch it, so I'm going to talk about it as a vampire movie.

Twilight tells a story that I know I liked when it was Buffy and Angel: trying-to-be-good-guy vampire falls for teenage girl, struggles with his blood lust and the other kind of lust, both of them confront trust issues, and there's lots of sexy temptation and whatnot. Sure, vampires struggling with abstinence can be a metaphor for teen sex, why not?

This version doesn't work, though, because it simply doesn't get vampires right. And I don't mean because they aren't vulnerable to holy objects, sunlight, or, apparently, stakings -- although that's part of it. And it's not because they don't have fangs, although that's part of it. And it's not even, good lord, because they sparkle, although, good lord, that's part of it.

It's because the story uses vampires (correctly) as a metaphor for ambivalence, and then isn't at all ambivalent about them.
I often have this complaint in the other direction, when straight-ahead horror movies ignore the fact that to be interesting vampires generally need to incite some kind of seduction or sympathy, and make them simple monsters instead of complex monsters. The problem with Twilight is that the vampires aren't monsters at all. AT ALL. Especially not Edward, the romantic hero. The only thing scary about him is his enormously high 80s-band pouf of hair, and the fact that he sparkles, and frankly, THAT'S THE WRONG KIND OF SCARY.

Really, nothing about the movie is sufficiently scary. It takes forever for something scary to happen, and then when it does, it's mostly offscreen. The good guy vampires aren't scary, the bad guy vampires are barely scary, the tribal native werewolves are cool but hardly on screen and they don't get to actually do anything scary although they manage to project the distinct sense that they could do something scary if the situation required, which is more than anybody else in the movie does, so, go werewolves!

The movie is certainly hampered by the source material, on all accounts. The director did not devise the plot, or the sparkling.

Okay, let me talk about the sparkling.

Oh, my god. Sparkling.

First of all, there is no way for the sparkling not to look stupid on screen, and that's because there is no way for it not to look stupid in real life, which, okay, I guess, the many fans of these novels simply never much thought about. But worst of all it's just a terrible gutless metaphor. These vampires hide from sunlight because it reveals their true nature, fair enough. But couldn't their true nature have been something just the teensiest bit unnerving or creepy, the tiniest bit, you know, monstrous? Like, I dunno, maybe they're translucent in sunlight and you can see their veins or something. That might have looked gross and kind of stupid, but at least it would have been heading in metaphorically the right direction.

And there's a scene where Edward chivalrously Rescues Our Hapless Heroine Bella from A Bunch of Port Angeles Toughs with Evil on Their Minds -- it might have been an opportunity to show Bella a little unnerved by his capacity for violence, to make him actually seem a little scary to the audience. But, alas, no. He doesn't fight them by ripping limbs or even bashing heads, he just kind of -- glares at them and they back down. Then he drives away. But in the car he talks about how he'd like to go back and kill them all!

All of Edward's monstrous nature is telling, not showing. He tells her that he feeds on animal blood, but we never see him actually do it. We don't even see a good strong indication that he does it, like, he never sniffs while a deer walks past and says, "Just a minute" and goes running off into the woods after it and comes back wiping his mouth.

He talks about how being in love with Bella makes him dangerous to her (well, really, it's some dumb thing about her very special personal scent which seems to blow out of her hair or whatever but I just pretended that whole concept didn't exist and that the reason he's so tempted by her is because he's in love), that he might eat her or something, but we never really see it. In this movie intense vampire lust is played with extreme closeups where Edward looks like he has a headache or something. And intense lust for a vampire is played with extreme closeups where Bella flutters her eyelids like she's about to faint and gnaws on her lower lip. Okay, really, the human is the one doing the gnawing? What kind of vampires are these, anyway?

Vampires who love baseball.

Which, uh, I don't know, I guess -- baseball? Maybe it could have worked in the context of a completely different story, but the scene in this movie is achingly cutesy, and serves only as yet another demonstration of cuddly, wholesome vampire superpowers. And then the bad vampires show up and want to play too, which strongly implies that all vampires love baseball, in fact, love it so much that they are lured from afar by the distinct sounds of other vampires hitting a ball so fast that they have to play during thunderstorms to hide the noise from humans (in Forks??!??) and also use a special reinforced ball and bat.

Okay, I made up that last bit. They don't use a special reinforced ball and bat. But they really ought to.

And... let's talk about superpowers for a minute.

Vampires usually have superpowers -- it's part of what makes them scary. They're really fast, really strong, they're immortal, they can see in the dark, maybe they have psychic abilities, maybe they're shapechangers, maybe they can fly. (I don't really mind that the vampires can fly, but I don't like to see it on screen because it usually ends up looking pretty stupid and this movie is no exception. In fact, it ends up looking stupider than usual.) But the thing that makes vampires different from superheroes is the downside -- the need for blood, the beast within, the vulnerability to ordinary things like sunlight.

Except these vampires don't have any of that.

Leaving aside Edward's singular blood lust for Bella, the good guy vampires never indicate that it's the least bit challenging for them to avoid chowing down on human necks. They seem even less passionate and violence-prone than regular teenagers. They're not vulnerable to sunlight, holy objects, or silver -- in fact, it seems like the only way to kill one is to dismember him and burn the pieces, and the only people with the strength to do that are other vampires. (And maybe werewolves, but that's probably in the sequel.)

It's also astonishingly easy to become a vampire in this story. All you have to do is get bit by a vampire that doesn't succeed in killing you all the way. Edward talks it up like this is very hard because vampires, once they start to feed, find it difficult not to go all the way. (Gosh, do you think that could be a metaphor for something?) And maybe it is hard for the vampire to just stop on his own. But geez, it's pretty easy to get interrupted, dude. With a scenario like this, I need an excellent explanation for why it's not all I Am Legend out there and 99 percent vampire within a few years.

Also, Edward makes a big deal about not turning Bella into a vampire, but this story gives him no conceivable reason on the face of the earth for not doing it. In this world, there is no downside to being a vampire.

Except the sparkling thing. That would drive me nuts.