Twilight...the movie

A couple of months ago, I decided to join the craze and read the Twilight series. It's technically a young adult series of books, but I kinda liked it. I had some issues with the writing style, but frankly, the storyline is pretty intriguing. In a nutshell...a human girl, Bella, falls in love with Edward. Who just happens to be a vampire. And who just happens to find the smell of her blood irresistible. There are 4 books in the series; I read the first 3 books within a few days in August, and I read the 4th book in September.

The first book, Twilight, was made into a movie and was released on November 21st. You may have heard of it. As of yesterday, it's made over $140 million at the box office. Shawn and I added $20 to that total and went to see it tonight. I thought it was okay. Honestly, though...I'm not sure I understand why anyone who hasn't read the books would enjoy the movie. I think it might best be explained with some numbers. The book is 544 pages long. The movie is 2 hours long. That's it.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of things that are left out of the movie. I completely understand that this happens when books are made into movies. However, I felt like there was very little character development in the movie. Relationships that were important in the book are completely glossed over in the movie. Elements of personality that will be very important in books later in the series aren't apparent in the movies. And the worst part of the movie? Bella and Edward's relationship. In the books, it's a nice little love story...kinda romantic. In the movie, it seems like teenage hormones and infatuation.

I'm a bit intrigued to see what will happen with the second movie. Like I said, there are some things that I thought were rather important in the books that were omitted or not very obvious in the movie. And apparently the production studio has fired the director because she wanted to spend more time carefully adapting the movie from the book...and the producers wanted to hurry up and start filming New Moon.

Now that I've said all this, if you haven't seen the movie (or the commercials, for that matter) and are intrigued, click here to see the trailer for Twilight.