I have been trying to get my head around the prospect of “Twilight” for some time. The movie which is based on Stephenie Meyers book, has received a huge amount of fanfare, primarily from its “target audience” (and I use that term loosely) of teenage girls. I will come back to the problem I have with this term later, but for now…

I have not read the Twilight saga but am intending to start on them tonight! So from my perspective, I am looking at the film on its own merits, and on the whole it was a very enjoyable movie. Not amazing or fantastic. But solid and very good.

The criticism that the film gets seems to be wholly misguided. As if the “target audience” is the only potential group of people who want to see a film that is to all intents a romantic depiction akin to Romeo & Juliet or A Room With A View. The plot is driven by the setting of the pacific north west being a haven for vampires, but this is a character device. One half of the main protagonists happens to be a vampire but this could as well be set 50 years ago and the male lead be black against a white middle class female heroine. If taken at face value, there is little to argue about.

Adaptations from mainstream books are always fraught with controversy, and by all accounts this is a fairly faithful example of source to screen translation. But it was readily apparent in some scenes that there was either an major glossing over, or a nod and wink to chapters of the book. After speaking with The Wife, if was clear that much of my objection to a small number of scenes were indeed pivotal chapters, and for those who have this “inside knowledge”, these seem to sit well. For myself, the aerial shots and spinning camera work while Edward and Bella lie in a very wet looking field seemed to drag. But who am I to know that this accounts for two whole chapters n the source material.

From this perspective, I would say that Catherine Hardwicke slipped up. Nods and winks are great when cracking a joke as to why the X-Men aren’t wearing yellow spandex, or that a VW Beetle is parked next to the 2007 Transformer equivalent, but they don’t carry so much weight when dealing with the build up of something so pivotal as two characters falling in love. In this respect, the major chink in the armour of the film is this “insider knowledge”.

But overall, a very enjoyable film.