Twilight is not a movie about vampires. It’s a movie about love. After seeing both Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the two young stars of this bold teen romance, explain this as their take on the wildly popular novels that inspired the film, I decided to approach the movie similarly. I’d be less concerned with my expectations of the wicked creatures of the night and instead just try to enjoy the lovey-dovey nonsense that I probably wouldn’t have wanted to see in the first place if it weren’t for the whole vampire thing.

Oh who am I kidding? I’m a sucker for true love. We all are, and while watching the film with the vampire twist as a secondary element proved to be a difficult challenge (because all these two talk about is how his being immortal, blood-thirsty and dead will affect their courtship) it’s easy to root for an honest and true love like Bella and Edward’s.

The vampire thing is only an obstacle, and if you think about it… every love has its share of problems to overcome. This time it just happens to be that one person desperately wants to eat the other. Love feels secondary when Twilight is less about finding the perfect person and more about finding the perfect meal and resisting the urge to eat it because you’d like to get to know it a little first. As if knowing the name of the cow would somehow make your steak taste better.

Regardless, the love story between the new girl in town and the secretive vampire actually works. It’s an exaggerated love, even by the standards of the high school melodrama setting where love feels like a matter of life and death. Bella and Edward are corny as hell and say things that not even the most sexually repressed love-struck puppy who just saw a his first boob would mistakenly woo his dream girl with, but it fits the film.

As up and down emotionally as Edward and Bella are, when the big kiss comes up - you can feel the electricity in the theater. A gradual rise of restrained squeals and gasps provided the soundtrack of a bunch of wet dreams coming to life on the big screen. It could be the testosterone in me talking but, for me, the movie felt like a drawn out yawn (a nice one though—the kind of yawn that dislodges a piece of food or something) right up until we got a chance to see vampires do what we expect them to do. Beating the fangs out of each other, jumping through the air with their arms arched out at their sides as if to say, “If I had wings, this is where they would be. And they would be awesome.”

The most compelling thing about this love story ends up being the very thing I was trying to overlook. I walked out wishing they’d spent more time dealing with actual life and death situations instead of two teenagers looking for roadblocks to make