I never thought I’d see the Twilight movie.  But I never thought I’d read the book either, and I did last year.  So here I am, like a boat borne back ceaselessly into lame teenage vampire fiction.

The movie was not as dull as the book, though it was still far from good.  I thought that Robert Pattinson, who plays the main vampire, did quite a good job with the role– in fact, the performance he gave was probably better than the role deserved.  Everybody else was nondescript. It is a pretty faithful adaptation of a fairly lame story, so it is doomed to be fairly lame itself.

The strangest thing about this movie was that the geography made absolutely no sense.  I’m not the sort of person who ordinarily notices this in movies, but it was obvious here.  At one point, the heroine goes into a rickety-looking bookstore seemingly perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean and accessible by a narrow alleyway that leads into a small city. Then a paved road suddenly appears from somewhere so the hero can show up in his car and save her from a group of thugs.  The layout of the place is impossible for me to understand.

The parking lot at the high school which the main characters attend seems to have no road leading into or out of it. Moreover, the cars in it are parked seemingly at random with no particular regard for lines or direction.  Also, the school itself is evidently located directly at the base of a massive and heavily forested mountain range.  The only reason for this seems to be so that couples have an easily accessible romantic location for their dates.

There is also a strange scene where the heroine and her father are eating by a window in a restaurant.  The light outside looks to be the light of early morning. Maybe it could be the light of evening, but it really looks more like early morning to me.  But the father alludes to it being “Friday night” and says something about going to sleep soon.  It was really quite weird. Also, the father’s car is parked out side the window for most of the scene (seemingly halfway inside a shrubbery, but that’s really nothing unusual for parking in this movie)  but then I swear it disappears in the last shot.

My impression of the movie was that the normal laws and logic of geometry do not apply in the town of Forks where the story is set.  Which would make for a much cooler premise than the one that is used in the stories–that is, that a family of immortal, demigod-like beings have chosen to spend eternity attending high school.