If Twilight had a decent score, it would have been a really good movie. Instead, it had a strange and irritating score that sounded like 25% Seattle grunge and 75% hokey, semi-atonal, new-age witches music. Plus it had weird and off-putting soundtrack of bizarre-sounding, spooky folk music. This is a love story, not a horror film! My wife said it best: “When you have your young lovers in a tree, you want the music to intensify the emotion of the situation, not distract from it.” Consider how the film starts to soar in the brief moments when Claire de Lune plays – this gives you a hint of what the film might have been had they paid attention to the score.

Even with the new-age witches music constantly intruding on everything, the film is still fun. Kristen Stewart is a marvel on screen – no one plays an awkward teenager like her. Combine Kristen Stewart with some good music and you’re half-way there (e.g. In the Land of Women.) The fellow playing Edward is pretty good, even if he appears to be channeling Bently Mitchum cir. 1993, for some reason. But what I did not expect is that the film is pretty well written. The set-up with the normal kids in school is really good, and it is interesting how this solid set-up actually stays with and enhances the movie all throughout. Supporting characters have a consistent place in the film, and are not summarily dropped after a while as they are in so many films of this ilk. The pacing of information is well done, and lots of information is conveyed through dialog. The dialog is kind of hard to listen to because both Edward and Bella talk in a haltering manner, but at least they made the effort to actually write dialog! They do have Kristen Stewart provide some narration, but the narration is minimal and pretty well done.

Many people were snarky about the vampires. I actually liked the super-stylish “Abercrombie & Fitch” vampires, and their cool house. I thought the CGI looked a little fake, but the good thing is that the movie did not rest on the CGI; it rests on dialog, as all good films do. Even the action part of the film at the end, when she is being hunted, is fun and engaging.

When this film came out last year, my wife and I arrogantly avoided it like the plague. We were like: “we want to see something GOOD, damn it!” So we saw everything but this movie – Bengamin Button, Slumdog, The Reader, Synecdoche. The joke is that even with its crappy music, Twilight wound up being better than all of them.