Twilight (film)

"When you can live forever, what do you live for?"

- Twilight tagline

Twilight is the movie adaptation of the novel Twilight, the first book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. Starring Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan and Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen, it was released November 21, 2008 in North America and December 11, 2008 in Australia. It was released on DVD March 21, 2009, and it is rated PG-13 in the US and 12 in the UK. It was directed by Catherine Hardwicke.

Plot
"I'd never given much thought to how I would die." But dying in the place of someone I love seemed like a good way to go."

- Bella narrating the opening line

Isabella "Bella" Swan lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her mother Renée and step-father Phil, who is a minor-league baseball player. Phil gets transferred to play baseball in Florida, so they decide to live there but Bella decides to live with her father, Charlie; who is the chief of police in Forks, Washington. Bella moves to Forks and is greeted by Charlie's friend, Billy Black, and Billy's son, Bella's childhood friend, Jacob Black. Charlie purchases a truck from Billy as a homecoming gift for Bella.

Bella meets people at Forks High School on her first day, students including Mike Newton, Eric Yorkie, Jessica Stanley, Tyler Crowley and Angela Weber. At the cafeteria, Bella learns about the strange Cullen family, five teenage-adult foster kids adopted by Carlisle, a young doctor in the community; who is 23 years old and married to Esme.

In Biology, Edward, one of the Cullen "kids”, seems completely disgusted with Bella and he goes away one second before the bell rings. She yearns to confront Edward but he is absent for a week. When he returns, he seems friendly and kind towards her, explaining that he was gone for "personal reasons". Much to Bella's surprise, Edward's black eyes have turned golden brown.

At the parking lot, Tyler's van goes out of control and is about to crush Bella. Edward, who is sitting by his car, across the lot, far away from Bella, moves quickly and stops the van with his hand, leaving a huge dent in the van's door.

Bella tries to get Edward to tell her how he stopped the van, but he warns her against befriending him, and that he might be a bad guy. The next day, their class goes on a field trip where she declines Mike's invitation to prom, and Edward relentlessly dodges her questions.

Bella and her friends go to the La Push beach and Jacob arrives with two of his friends, Embry Call and Sam Uley. She persuades him to tell her a tribal story involving the Cullens.

As Bella goes with Angela and Jessica to Port Angeles for dress shopping, Bella goes off by herself to find a book on Quileute legends. Soonafter that, she runs into a dangerous gang about to make their move on her before Edward unexpectedly appears to stop them. Edward and Bella later have a deep conversation regarding his ability to hear people's thoughts and his inability to read her mind, confessing it as "very frustrating". In the meantime, a close friend of Charlie's is found dead in his boat.

Bella uses her book and finds a website about vampires when searching 'The Cold One' on Google. The website shows details about vampires and the descriptions she read match Edward's characteristics. Upon realizing what he is, she confronts him the next day in a clearing in the woods nearby. Instead of being scared of the truth, she just bravely accepts him for what he is: a vampire.

Edward and Bella fall in love and openly show their relationship. Eventually, he introduces her to his vampire family: Carlisle, Esme, Alice, Jasper, Emmett and Rosalie. Soon, the pair realize their love for each other is so strong and he hopes to never lose control when he is around her.

Later on, Bella is offered a chance a human rarely or never gets: to assist a baseball game between vampires. The game goes apparently well, until Alice sees a vision of three nomadic vampires that have been involved in the killings in Forks lately approaching. Edward and Bella prepare to leave, but it's too late. James, a tracker vampire, is intrigued by Edward's protectiveness over a human and wants to hunt Bella for sport. Carlisle tells James, Laurent, and Victoria to leave after James' outburst. However, he wants to kill Bella, and plots a plan to get rid of the Cullens and eat her. Knowing about the plan, the Cullens split up Edward and Bella to save her life. Edward, Emmett, and Rosalie find out James has figured out the truth and has escaped. Esme and Rosalie stay behind to protect Charlie while Edward, Emmett, and Carlisle go to Phoenix where Bella is hiding in a hotel with Alice and Jasper.

James calls and lies to Bella that he has caught her mother and will kill her if Bella doesn't come to a ballet studio alone. Alice, who can see the future, gets to know something terrible will happen in a dark ballet studio. When Jasper and Alice are in the hotel lobby, Bella ditches them and takes a taxi and goes to the studio, where she gets bitten by James on the wrist while he is fighting Edward.

James is burned to ashes by Emmett, Jasper and Alice, and Edward sucks the venom out of Bella's system, which stops her transformation. She awakes in the hospital and recovers with her mother by her side. Edward tells her to move to Jacksonville so she would be safe from him, but she persuades him otherwise.

In the end, Edward and Bella attend their high school prom and she asks him to turn her into a vampire to be with him forever, but he kisses her instead. Bella decides to enjoy the evening, but is determined to someday become a vampire to be with him. The film ends with James's lover, Victoria, secretly watching the pair dancing and swears revenge.

Development
Twilight was originally optioned by Paramount Pictures' MTV Films. According to Catherine Hardwicke, a script was produced even before the novel was published. It bore little resemblance to the actual novel or the final movie; for example Bella was a track star, and the FBI was chasing the vampires on jet skis. When that option lapsed in summer 2007, the novel was optioned by Summit Entertainment. Catherine Hardwicke was brought in to direct the film. After reading the original script, she went and read the novel. She decided that the script needed to be rewritten from scratch. Melissa Rosenberg was hired for the new version. On November 16, 2007, Summit Entertainment, along with Stephenie Meyer, announced that Kristen Stewart had been cast in the role of Isabella Swan. A month later, on December 11, 2007 it was announced that Robert Pattinson had been cast as Edward Cullen. Summit Entertainment had an open casting call for the role of Jacob Black on January 19, 2008, and Taylor Lautner was cast.

Adaptation from source material
The filmmakers behind Twilight worked to create a film that was as faithful to the novel as they thought possible when converting the story to another medium, with producer Greg Mooradian saying, "It's very important to distinguish that we're making a separate piece of art that obviously is going to remain very, very faithful to the book.... But at the same time, we have a separate responsibility to make the best movie you can make." To ensure a faithful adaptation, Meyer was kept very involved in the production process, having been invited to visit the set during filming and even asked to give notes on the script and on a rough cut of the film. Of this process, she said, "It was a really pleasant exchange [between me and the filmmakers] from the beginning, which I think is not very typical. They were really interested in my ideas", and, "...they kept me in the loop and with the script, they let me see it and said, 'What are your thoughts?'... They let me have input on it and I think they took 90 percent of what I said and just incorporated it right in to the script." Meyer fought for one line in particular, one of the most well-known from the book about "the lion and the lamb", to be kept verbatim in the film: "I actually think the way Melissa [Rosenberg] wrote it sounded better for the movie [...] but the problem is that line is actually tattooed on peoples' bodies [...] But I said, 'You know, if you take that one and change it, that's a potential backlash situation.'" Meyer was even invited to create a written list of things that could not be changed for the film, such as giving the vampires fangs or killing characters who do not die in the book, that the studio agreed to follow. The consensus among critics is that the filmmakers succeeded in making a film that is very faithful to its source material, with one reviewer stating that, with a few exceptions, "Twilight the movie is unerringly faithful to the source without being hamstrung by it."

"They could have filmed [the script developed when the project was at Paramount] and not called it Twilight because it had nothing to do with the book... When Summit [Entertainment] came into the picture, they were so open to letting us make rules for them, like "Okay, Bella cannot be a track star. Bella cannot have a gun or night vision goggles. And, no jet skis....""

- Stephenie Meyer

However, as is most often the case with film adaptations, differences exist between the film and source material. Certain scenes from the book were cut from the film, such as a biology room scene where Bella's class does blood typing. Hardwicke explains, "Well [the book is] almost 500 pages—you do have to do the sweetened condensed milk version of that.... We already have two scenes in biology: the first time they're in there and then the second time when they connect. For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over. So that's not in there." The settings of certain conversations in the book were also changed to make the scenes more "visually dynamic" on-screen, such as Bella's revelation that she knows Edward is a vampire—this happens in a meadow in the film instead of in Edward's car as in the novel. A biology field trip scene is added to the film to condense the moments of Bella's frustration at trying to explain how Edward saved her from being crushed by a van. The villainous vampires are introduced earlier in the film than in the novel. Rosenberg said that "you don't really see James and the other villains until to the last quarter of the book, which really won't work for a movie. You need that ominous tension right off the bat. We needed to see them and that impending danger from the start. And so I had to create back story for them, what they were up to, to flesh them out a bit as characters."

Rosenberg also combined some of the human high school students, with Lauren Mallory and Jessica Stanley in the novel becoming the character of Jessica in the film, and a "compilation of a couple of different human characters" becoming Eric Yorkie. About these variances from the book, Mooradian stated, "I think we did a really judicious job of distilling [the book]. Our greatest critic, Stephenie Meyer, loves the screenplay, and that tells me that we made all the right choices in terms of what to keep and what to lose. Invariably, you're going to lose bits and pieces that certain members of the audience are going to desperately want to see, but there's just a reality that we're not making 'Twilight: The Book' the movie."

Soundtrack
The Twilight Original Motion Picture Soundtrack debuted at #1 on the Billboard albums sales chart, having sold about 165,000 copies in its first week of release. 29%, or 48,000, were digital downloads. Twilight scored the second biggest digital week for a soundtrack since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking album download sales in 2004.

Score
The score for Twilight was composed by Carter Burwell and released on December 9, 2008 unter the Atlantic label.

Production
Filming in Oregon began in March 2008 and lasted for 44 days, ending on May 2, 2008. Additional footage and some reshoots were made in late August, including the scene where Edward plays piano, the scene where Edward and Bella kiss in the bedroom, and the meadow scene. Hardwicke confessed that she finished working on the film October 31, 2008. Director Catherine Hardwicke claims that finding the perfect meadow for the emotional climax scene was very difficult. Although the scene was set to be filmed near the end of the schedule, the original site they chose was still covered in snow and inaccessible. They then found a forest with boulders and old growth trees, and with time running out, chose to film some of the scene there. However, the director said that after they wrapped the movie, she told them, "I've got to shoot a meadow. Something that looks like a meadow. Or people are going to stone me in the streets." So they shot part of the scene in the middle of the Griffith Park golf course. In order to make Edward sparkle in the sunlight, they worked with Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), George Lucas' special effects company.

Reception
Twilight received mixed reviews from critics. Based on 204 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an overall "Rotten" rating of 49%, with a weighted average score of 5.5/10. In describing the critical consensus, it stated: "Having lost much of its bite transitioning to the big screen, Twilight will please its devoted fans, but do little for the uninitiated." On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 reviews from film critics, it has an average score of 56 from the 37 reviews. New York Press critic Armond White called the film "a genuine pop classic", and praised Hardwicke for turning "Meyer's book series into a Brontë-esque vision." Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "I saw it at a sneak preview. Last time I saw a movie in that same theater, the audience welcomed it as an opportunity to catch up on gossip, texting, and laughing at private jokes. This time the audience was rapt with attention". In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "Twilight is unabashedly a romance. All the story's inherent silliness aside, it is intent on conveying the magic of meeting that one special person you've been waiting for. Maybe it is possible to be 13 and female for a few hours after all". USA Today gave the film two out of four stars and Claudia Puig wrote, "Meyer is said to have been involved in the production of Twilight, but her novel was substantially more absorbing than the unintentionally funny and quickly forgettable film". Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Hardwicke's direction: "She has reconjured Meyer's novel as a cloudburst mood piece filled with stormy skies, rippling hormones, and understated visual effects".

DVD and Blu-Ray
The release date for the Twilight DVD and Blu-Ray DVD was March 21, 2009.

DVD Special Features

 * Audio commentary by Catherine Hardwicke, Kristen Stewart, and Robert Pattinson
 * Muse music video: "Super Massive Black Hole"
 * Paramore music video: "Decode"
 * Linkin Park music video: "Leave Out All the Rest"
 * Five extended scenes with director introductions
 * Five deleted scenes with director introductions
 * Seven-part documentary: "The Adventure Begins: The Journey from Page to Screen"
 * Comic-Con "fandom" piece.
 * Comic-Con NY sizzle reel
 * Three trailers
 * Penelope trailer

Blu-Ray Special Features

 * Audio commentary by Catherine Hardwicke, Kristen Stewart, and Robert Pattinson
 * Muse music video: "Supermassive Black Hole"
 * Paramore music video: "Decode"
 * Linkin Park music video: "Leave Out All the Rest"
 * Five extended scenes with director introductions
 * Five deleted scenes with director introductions
 * Seven-part documentary: "The Adventure Begins: The Journey from Page to Screen"
 * Comic-Con "fandom" piece
 * Comic-Con NY sizzle reel
 * Three trailers
 * Penelope trailer
 * Breaking Dawn Live with New Moon teaser