That may make him catnip to anyone with OJD (obsessive Jonas Brothers disorder), but it also means he’s a bore, despite the efforts of the capable and exotically beautiful Pattinson. (The actor first broke hearts as the martyred Cedric Diggory in the Harry Potter cycle.) Though her filmmaking can be shaky, the director Catherine Hardwicke has an eye for pretty young things and a feel for the private worlds that younger people make for themselves. But she’s working in shackles here. In her best movie, Lords of Dogtown, about the birth of the modern skateboard movement, a teenage boy sneaks out at night by slaloming off a roof while holding a surfboard. It’s a blissful declaration of freedom, including freedom from the big parental “no.”
Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in Twilight, notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down. If Meyer has made the vampire story safe for her readers (and their parents) — the sole real menace comes from a half-baked subplot involving some swaggering vampires who like their steak saignant and human — it’s only because she suggests that there actually is something worse than death, especially for teenagers: sex. Faced with the partially clad Bella (who would bite if she could), Edward recoils from her like a distraught Victorian. Like Hardwicke, the poor boy has been defanged and almost entirely drained. He’s so lifeless, he might as well be dead — oops, he already is.
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