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Bella the Vampire non-layer angsts her way into theatres.

Admin Note: In honor of the release of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” and to whet your appetite for our forthcoming review, reprinted here is Kevin’s original review of “Twilight” from the UCR Highlander.

On atheism, the Belgian poet Émile Cammaerts wrote that “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” In the wake of Harry Potter, a global fascination that lasted over a decade, millions of people needed something to turn to. In many cases, that something was “Twilight.” It’s not hard to find the appeal, either. The characters are written broadly: Bella, the story’s protagonist, seems to be the perfect blend of what female readers are and what they wish they were, giving her an “every girl” feeling. Edward Cullen is dark and mysterious, sculpted out of stone, but also sensitive and protective; he’s James Dean getting your kitten out of a tree.

At the start of the film, Bella is transplanted from her Arizona home, making the long journey to the small town of Forks, Washington. She moves in with her father, and matriculates into the local school toward the end of her junior year. Though she assures us more than once, through narration and one of many awkward conversations with her father, that she prefers to be alone, she quickly makes friends with a group of thinly drawn stereotypes that serve as plot points and quickly fade into the background. The film then shifts to Edward, the pale, brooding loner. After watching him have what seems like twenty minutes of staring contests with Bella underscored by ominous music, they finally have their first encounter in biology class. When he first sees her, he appears to gag, and remains painfully silent the rest of the class period before disappearing for days.

But their love is inevitable. We’re not sure where it comes from — the staring, the physical attraction, the Clark Kent theatrics, the classy breaking-into-a-house-and-watching-a-girl-while-she-sleeps move — but when phrases like “I’d rather die than to stay away from you” come out of the mouth of a 17-year-old girl who’s had limited interaction with a boy over the course of a few weeks, we’re nothing if not convinced.

After a suspenseless guessing game over what Edward really is, he takes Bella up a mountain for the big reveal. With all the evidence stacking up against their “love,” they proceed unafraid. Bella soon meets Edward’s vampire family (who, because they do not eat humans, consider themselves “vegetarians”, a frustrating misnomer), who are quick to like Bella, and even quicker to trust her. On a particularly stormy day, they even take her out to the middle of nowhere to witness them play the great vampiric past-time, baseball (a.k.a. muggle Quidditch). It is in this absurd setting that the first real conflict of the film begins. A trio of vagrant vampires stumbles upon their game, and a chase ensues. The family for some reason separates, sacrificing their greater numbers in an attempted ruse, which unsurprisingly doesn’t work. Fearing for her mother’s life, Bella is drawn out from protection by James’s battue and led to her old dance studio and the film’s climax.

The worst part of this film and no doubt the source material is its message. Its heroine is nothing of the sort: she’s not strong, she’s not particularly capable of much else besides frowning, and she’s entirely, unapologetically co-dependent. Meyer creates one of the weakest female characters in recent memory. “Twilight” instructs female readers to define themselves not by their actions or their intellect, but through another person. In many iterations throughout the film, Bella reassures Edward and herself that without their relationship, she is nothing. Edward does the same, going as far as to say “you are my life now” to Bella.

The film’s producers have been trying hard to sell “Twilight” as a Romeo and Juliet story, but the forbidden love aspect doesn’t seem all that forbidden. Both families seems to accept the other and aside from Edward’s jealous “sister” and the old hat protective father routine, there doesn’t seem to be anyone standing in the way of their love outside of their own grandiose view of it. Theirs is an affectation of youth, the desperate need to make things more important than they are, to give weight to otherwise insignificant things. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, it is not a timeless love story, and Stephanie Meyer is no Shakespeare. The phenomenon of “Twilight,” in the end, is about lowered standards. The book asks less of a reader, the movie asks less of a viewer, and Bella teaches girls to ask less of a female lead – and perhaps themselves.