There are a lot of things about the movies comprising The Twilight Saga that haven’t aged well, such as problematic writing, bad acting, and effects that should have been much better. Twilight exploded in the late 2000s and revitalized the vampire romance subgenre, offering a seemingly ideal star-crossed romantasy escape. The story follows average-as-can-be teenager Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), who moves to the town of Forks, Washington to live with her father and finds herself inside an epic romance and fantasy adventure.
Bella’s Relationships With Edward & Jacob Are Abusive
Both Edward & Jacob Are Possessive Of Bella
The central plot of Twilight is based on Bella’s romance with vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), which turns into a love triangle with werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Team Edward vs. Team Jacob was a cultural phenomenon in the early 2010s, despite neither of them actually being a good match. Both are possessive and controlling, making their respective relationships with Bella toxic. Principally, they are both determined to stop Bella from seeing the other one.
Twilight’s Vampire Makeup
Twilight’s Vampires Look Silly & Unnatural
The Twilight books set the movies up for failure in a way a lot of fantasy novels dealing with supernatural beings do, describing the vampires as being so ethereal and beautiful that everyone around them is awestruck. They are inherently describing people who are not human, and whose true appearances do not exist in real life. This leaves the Twilight movie adaptations stumbling to figure out a way to capture the effect as written in Stephenie Meyer’s books.
It Would Be Better To Spend More Time With Twilight’s Supporting Cast
Twilight Has A Lot Of Good Supporting Characters Who Are Underused
There are a lot of supporting characters in Twilight whose spinoffs would be more interesting than the actual movies. Twilight might have been able to spend some more time exploring these characters if they weren’t so oddly distributed across the story. There are characters like the Cullen family, the Volturi, and Jacob’s pack who should have been given more attention throughout the series, but are sidelined in favor of the main romantic entanglements.
Twilight’s Vampires Use Their Immortality To Repeat High School
Twilight Has A Mundane Setting That Hurts The Story
The barrage of supporting characters introduced near Twilight’s ending highlight that there are other ways to live as vampires than how the Cullens do it. With immortality and a natural skill for just about anything, the vampire characters in Twilight are free to travel, study, and generally do whatever they want so long as they are not seen in direct sunlight. The Cullens are just repeating high school over and over again.
Robert Pattinson & Kristen Stewart Are Better Actors Than Twilight Allowed Them To Be
The Twilight Cast Has Gone On To Appear In Much Better Movies
The dialogue and basic scene structures are so awkward in Twilight that the actors playing the main characters never really stood a chance. Most of them were still relatively unknown at the time and trying to get their careers off the ground, so the opportunity to appear in a major blockbuster would undoubtedly have been tempting. Yet roles that are only about staring creepily at someone and delivering cringe-worthy lines no one would say in real life gave the actors little opportunity to flex their chops.
Twilight Appropriates Quileute Culture
A Twilight Subplot Features Racially Insensitive Themes
The Twilight series’ handling of Jacob’s heritage could be interpreted as a case of cultural appropriation. Once the story was set in Forks, the Quilete tribe, whose reservation is just outside Forks, also became a part of the plot. Twilight’s version of the Quilete lore is partially inspired by the real Quilete culture, but large parts concerning the werewolves and origin myth are fictional. Therefore, Twilight appropriated a real culture and changed it to serve the needs of the story.
Bella & Edward’s Age Gap
Bella & Edward’s Relationship Has An Unsettling Age Gap
At one point in Twilight: New Moon, Bella jokes that maybe she shouldn’t be with such an old man, which might be one of the most disturbing things she says, given how accurate it is. Bella is 17 to 19 years old in Twilight, while Edward is over 110 years old. There is already something of a stigma surrounding relationships with age gaps of more than 10 years in society, let alone a century. This is made worse by Bella being underage when she and Edward meet.
