Twilight’s movie adaptations wasted creepy villains Alec and Jane by jettisoning their violent powers in favor of screen time for the core romance.
The Twilight movies missed out on utilizing some of the saga’s best novel villains to their full potential due to the adaptations focusing too much on the central romance. Released in 2008, Twilight was a massive hit with audiences despite receiving brutal reviews from critics. An adaptation of the best-selling young adult paranormal romance saga of the same name, Twilight was the tale of an immortal teenage vampire falling for a small-town girl.
The romance angle of the series was one familiar to many readers – especially those used to many of the conventions of supernatural romance novels – so much so that Paramount’s canceled adaptation of Twilight turned its meek unassuming heroine into a jet-skiing secret agent to give the story more of an action-focused approach. However, this treatment was vetoed and what viewers got was much closer to the original novel, save for one small, vital difference. Twilight added a murder mystery subplot to liven up proceedings, something its lesser sequels failed to do.
The later Twilight movies understandably chose to focus on Bella and Edward’s romance over adding in more supernatural action but, in the process of adaptation, the saga lost some of its most threatening and compelling antagonists as a result. Aware that the love story would only engage a portion of the audience for the entire of the movie’s runtime, original Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke thus chose to add in a gruesome (although entirely offscreen) series of murders committed by the movie’s villains Victoria, Laurent, and James. Failing to add a similarly dark subplot to the action of Breaking Dawn and New Moon not only makes the movies less engaging, but it also results in the series wasting some great villains from the source novels.
Why Eclipse and Twilight’s Villains Worked
Both the original Twilight and its second sequel, 2010’s Eclipse, focused on the violent misdeeds of their villains while still finding time to keep Bella and Edward’s “will they, won’t they” romance center stage. The slow progress that Bryce Dallas Howard’s Eclipse villainess Victoria makes towards the pair allows the sequel to dwell on Edward and Bella’s relationship while still building tension, while the presence of Cam Gigandet’s villain James in Twilight ensures that the central conflict of the movie is not solely whether Bella and Edward will end up together. This approach was abandoned in New Moon and Breaking Dawn, however, which offers less compelling conflicts as a result — which is a shame when their villains, the Volturi, are some of Twilight’s scariest characters.
Jane and Alec Barely Appeared
The Volturi themselves, like most fantasy royalty, are not the sort of villains who get their hands dirty, and they instead leave most of their worst misdeeds to creepy henchmen (or hench-children, as it were), Jane and Alec. Played by Dakota Fanning and Cameron Bright, Jane and Alec were two of the saga’s most unsettling villains. These creepy Twilight franchise villains were perpetually trapped in childhood after being turned at a young age, and Jane had the horrifying ability to force her enemies to feel the unimaginable pain she felt when she was burned alive. It’s a skill that is mentioned once in her brief movies appearances but never properly used, and one which could have been terrifying if utilized in the adaptations. Alec, meanwhile, could mentally torture victims by shutting them off from the world through sensory deprivation, a deeply creepy idea the movies never find the space to explore despite its cinematic potential.
The Volturi Were Originally More Tortured
One of the Volturi’s less vocal members Marcus can be seen uttering “finally” when he’s killed in Breaking Dawn, but the movie fails to explain why he’s so relieved to die. In the novels, he lost his love to a Volturi power struggle centuries earlier and has spent hundreds of years bitter and despondent as a result. It’s not just Marcus, though — with some of them being thousands of years of old, the Volturi at large are implied to be hopelessly tortured by the burden of their amoral deeds, something the campy villainy of the movies misses out on. Michael Sheen’s Aro is hilariously over-the-top and the actor has fun in the role, but the scenery-chewing means that the series never gets to depict the Volturi as truly tortured immortals whose lust for power has consumed everything they care about as humans .
Take the ending of New Moon, the weakest Twilight movie. The image of the Volturi, a group that longs for the release of death, relishing the chance to kill a willing Edward should be horrifying and tense, but the movie never gives viewers much of an idea of who these vampires are or how they operate.
