The movie is stuffed with melodrama and cheesy lines, shirtless men with rock-hard abs, pangs of sappy romantic love, dizzying camera work, racial stereotypes, occasional spurts of humor, love lessons for girls, passable soundtrack, doses of sex appeal, some neat fight sequences, comprehensible mythology, and philosophical musings. All in all, these are mostly what the imperative ingredients are for chick flicks marketed to teenage girls and twenty-something girlfriends. The movie phenomenon is largely a windfall of pop culture.

Definitely not a breakthrough literature, as some have claimed, Stephenie Meyer’s novels (two more Twilight movies coming up, it is said) are formula-structured romance novels – again, exactly the usual reading fare of young females. They have all the accoutrements of such a genre: sappy dialogue, play on emotions, and idealistic notions of love.

The film gets boring when it waxes philosophical, and asks some morality and ethics questions. Does a vampire have a soul? Huh? Hello. This is the part that loses the target audience who is just chewing the personification of myth. In front of the movie screen, the target audience is just still juggling the mental choice between vampires owning baser instincts like hungry animals of prey and some vampires, such as the Cullens, ‘striving for a socially acceptable way of dealing with their situation by “peacefully” coexisting with humans.’

Mighty heavy for the target audience to digest such notions as to whether a vampire has a soul when said audience might be prone to think that the mythical vampire can hardly be caught in existential dilemma.

When Edward inwardly agonizes with the ethical quandary of turning Bella into a vampire, his considerations are nowhere near moral or philosophical. His dilemma is between wanting to have her forever and not wanting to make her eat deer and keeping out of the sunlight for all eternity.

Stephenie Meyer does know her formula like the back of her hand.

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