Towards the end of 2011, my sister convinced me to see a
movie in a franchise I had never heard before. As luck would have it, I managed
to get a seat on opening night. The movie started with a beautiful white
wedding between a mortal and her vampire beau. Their exotic honeymoon was cut
short due to an unexpected complication: the mortal got pregnant. As the fetus
grew, her new husband and his family speculated and prepared for the
worst. Labor pains put the mortal in
grave danger. By the time the delivery was over, so was her life. As you might
have already guessed, I am talking about the movie, Breaking Dawn: Part I,
starring Kristen Stewart as the mortal, Belle, and Robert Pattinson as the
vampire, Edward Cullen.
The movie was engaging because the sets were creative and
dynamic. But in the end, it was an unlikely story about a love triangle between
a mortal, a vampire, and a werewolf. Two out of the three main characters were
fictitious in nature. And yet, people of all ages (albeit mostly female) had
camped out for a chance to purchase a ticket for opening night. I mean, I have
heard of such phenomena, but I had never seen it until now. I think that is one
of the reasons why I liked the movie so much.
I was curious. How
could so many intelligent people (again, mostly female) be so carried away with
this film series? To find out, I went to a thrift store a picked up a copy of
the first installment, Twilight. I read it, and then went back and read parts
of it again. But in all my searching, I couldn’t find anything particularly
extraordinary about the story. Remember the ferver with which I saw the
audience that surrounded me in the movie theater, I picked up the second installment
and read it all the way through. It took me until the end of the third book,
Aclipse, to finally come to the conclusion that the very ordinariness of the
storyline is what has captured the imagination of millions. And the fact that
the main characters were in their teens didn’t escape me. Shortly after the
first book was released, a new genre had evolved: Young Adult Fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment