The first Twilight film was released 16 years ago and, for many of us, the franchise has long since lost any sense of currency. Without the white heat of fandom surrounding their release, watching the Twilight films today is like trying to watch an echo. It’s like finding a fidget spinner in the street and trying to remember why everyone loved them so much. Without the heft of the cultural phenomenon that surrounded their release, the Twilight films now come off as witless and inert. They feel like TV movies, like a cheap Netflix acquisition dumped into a submenu without fanfare.
And this is to be expected. New films are released all the time, and only a tiny percentage of them are ever destined to be fondly remembered. And yet maybe we wrote Twilight off too soon. Yes, the film’s stars – Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart – have spent their subsequent careers making knotty and uncommercial films, apparently as a direct reaction to starring in such toothless teenybop fare. Yes, it’s spoken about so rarely these days that its popularity feels like the result of a mass psychogenic illness, like the dancing plagues of the middle ages. Yes, it seems absurd that they actually made five of the things.
