Twilight: The Superior Book-to-Movie Adaptation
This story actually works so much better as a film than as a novel.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I used to be one of those snobs who would, after watching a film adaptation of a book I’d read, point out all of the things that the movie got wrong and how vastly inferior it was to the source material.
In fact, when I was in high school, a family member got me a T-shirt that said, “The book was better,” for my birthday.
Of course, I now realize how pretentious that statement is. It basically means, “I’m smarter and inherently a better person than you because I enjoy reading more than watching movies like the rest of you simpletons.”
Needless to say, I don’t wear that T-shirt anymore.
The one exception to this belief was when the first movie in the Twilight Saga came out. I was in seventh grade and saw it on the Friday evening when it was released in a movie theater that was absolutely packed with an audience of mostly young women.
At this point, I was obsessed with the book series, and I couldn't wait to see these characters on the big screen. I can still recall how everyone in the theater cheered when a white-foundation-slathered Robert Pattinson first appeared on-screen.
That was probably the first book-based movie I’d seen where I didn’t think afterward that the book was better. After all, I’d been seeing each new Harry Potter film in theaters for years at this point, only to walk out slightly disappointed that certain storylines had not been included.
But Twilight was different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time, though, because I hadn’t yet realized that not every single movie is worse than the book that inspired it.
I can’t speak for the rest of the films in the Twilight Saga, as I’ve only watched the first one (my Twilight-loving phase quickly turned into a Twilight-hating phase between the releases of Twilight and New Moon). However, I wholeheartedly believe that the Twilight movie is markedly better than the book, for several reasons:
Many of the mundane passages have been cut.
The book is filled with long passages describing the humdrum details of Bella going about her day. Even back when I used to ravenously re-read these books in middle school, I found myself skipping those passages. The actual “action” of the story (the romance with Edward) doesn’t start to occur in earnest until about a third to halfway through the book.
In the film, these scenes can easily be skipped over, allowing most of the other details from the story to actually be included. A common complaint about book-to-movie adaptations is that they have to cut out some story details, characters, or even side plots due to time constraints. But the story of the first Twilight book is so simple that the vast majority of it can be included in the movie. Because of this, it doesn’t feel like a huge portion of the story was lost in the way that it does with many other book-to-movie adaptations.
Bella is not as painfully boring a character.
In the books, Bella is obviously meant to be a stand-in for author Stephenie Meyer and, by extension, the reader. As a result, she barely has a personality because the reader is meant to project their own personality onto her.
After the movie was released, Kristen Stewart (Bella) received ungodly amounts of hate over her “inability to act” without these critics realizing that what little emotion she brought to the screen was much, much more than the Bella of the books ever had. Stewart actually did a wonderful job of portraying this character while having very little to go off of, and I believe she doesn’t get nearly enough credit for that.
The story isn’t entirely from Bella’s point of view.
As mentioned earlier, Bella’s internal monologue can get real boring real fast. In the film, sometimes we break off with Edward to see what he’s getting up to. This lets us get more of a glimpse into his family life and get to know the other characters better.
The movie adds a few things that make it more interesting.
For one, the vampires make a wholly unnecessary but really cool whooshing noise when they jump around. To my knowledge, this was never mentioned in the books, which tried to maintain a more serious tone. But at some points, the movie tried to add humor (more on this below). I’m not sure if the whooshing sound was meant to be funny, but to me, it definitely came across the way.
The movie also includes a brief scene of Edward’s family preparing an Italian meal for Bella right before she visits their house for the first time. Edward’s adopted sister Rosalie frustratedly asks, “Is she even Italian?” and her boyfriend-but-also-technically-adopted-brother Emmett (their family situation is strange, to say the least, and I don’t have time to get into it here) puts the matter to rest by succinctly replying, “Her name is Bella.”
Not gonna lie, I’d completely forgotten about that gem until I saw screenshots of that scene start circulating online a couple of years ago.
Lastly, we get to actually see the climactic fight between Edward and James, instead of having Bella wake up later and get told about it. Yeah, it’s not the most action-packed scene in cinematic history, but it’s better than the absolute nothing that’s in the book.
The climax doesn’t seemingly come out of nowhere.
Throughout the film, we see gradual evidence of the three villains — James, Laurent, and Victoria — wreaking havoc. In the book, these characters were barely even mentioned before they arrived and became an immediate threat to Bella. For this reason, it doesn’t feel like the climax of the story was jarring, and the resolution at the end doesn’t seem very well-earned. The movie was at least closer in following the typical Freitag pyramid story structure.
The soundtrack SLAPS.
Okay, I know this one isn’t entirely fair since books don’t contain music as movies do. But almost everyone I’ve talked to about this has said that despite how they feel about the movie Twilight, they agree that every song on the soundtrack goes HARD. So many people my age would not have gotten as into Paramore and Muse as they did without those bands being popularized by this movie.
Of course, none of this is to say that Twilight is a perfect movie; far from it. (It has plenty of flaws, from Taylor Lautner — who is apparently white, not indigenous like he looks — playing an indigenous character to its problematic portrayal of the Quileute tribe [which doesn’t get truly awful until the later installments of the series] and the argument that Edward’s and Bella’s relationship contains many of the hallmarks of abuse.)
But as far as book-to-movie adaptations go, I personally think that few of them pull it off as well as Twilight. It manages to remain quite faithful to the source material while also improving on it significantly.
