Apparently people are already excited about the upcoming Twilight film. Cineworld are celebrating with a "Twilight Day" when you can watch all of the other films, back to back, finishing with the new film at 00:01 on release day. But for me, Twilight is wrong on so many levels.
I'm not just blindly criticising, I've read the books, and seen most of the films. Now that I have the full story, I just don't like it. It irritates me. It disturbs me. It also disturbs me that Stephanie Meyer advertises it as a lovely, teenage romance book, when a lot of it is vile on levels teenage girls won't see.
Edward is a stalker. If your teenage daughter had a regular teenage boy loitering around the garden and sneaking into her room in the dead of night to watch her sleep, that would raise security/legal issues. If the daughter was under-age and the man was much older, that would raise even more legal issues (and possibly a few pitchforks and flaming torches, depending on where you live).
If he were human, he would be a mentally (and occasionally physically) abusive, controlling partner. He takes away her right to make her own decisions, monopolises her time taking her away from what social circle she has and making her more reliant on him, threatens with displays of his power.
Meyer insists that Bella is a feminist because feminism "is the right to make a choice". Which is all very well. But that choice is essentially between necrophilia and bestiality. Lovely teenage romance book.
Let's get right to the heart of the matter. The cold, dead, unbeating heart. Now the whole issue of the last Twilight book and the latest film is Bella and Edward's child (who's bizarre compounded name escapes me at the moment). Let's go over that again. Child. Vampire . . . creating child. Now, I'm going to assume that you are all old enough to be familiar with the necessities behind creating children. But just incase any kids stumble across this, I'm not going to go into it. But essentially my problems with this stem from the cold, dead, unbeating heart. That, and this quote from Meyer:
"Most human fluids are absent in my vampires. No sweat, no tears, no blood besides that which they ingest–they don’t have their own blood."
Now for those who paid attention in Biology, we are going to be needing some blood to rush to some places here. There are no mentions of vampiric turkey-basters, put it that way. Edward has no blood. So some fans get around that by saying "But vampires are always described as having bodies as hard as marble, granite, rock . . ." so maybe blood isn't necessary. Fair enough. I'll give way on the blood thing. Let's assume for a moment that Edward is a paler, wussier, more constipated-looking version of Thing from the Fantastic Four (sorry geeks). Other fluids are still required. See Meyer quote above.
And another thing . . .If vampires of both sexes all have rock-hard marble bodies . . . Well that just doesn't sound sexy at all to me. Surely the romantic scenes would have been more like this:
"It's clobberin' time!"
So [spoiler alert, if you care] there's pestle 'n' mortar time, there's a baby, Bella's a vampire (dear goodness, that miserable face for an eternity, ugh), there's a hot-blooded teenage werewolf boy fixated on a baby girl . . .Wait, what?! Excuse me? So . . . Jacob is madly in love with/fixated on Bella, until she goes all bitey, and then the fixation transfers to her baby when their eyes meet. Love at first sight. Which is covered in the book by the convenient "Oh, he loves her like a brother whilst she's a baby...It's only when she 'comes of age' that he will romantically fall in love with her . . ." So it's OK that he falls in love with a seven-year-old who looks seventeen, because before that he considered her his little sister? And then my brain exploded.
No comments:
Post a Comment