Twilight: B-

Girl is born. Parents get divorced. Years pass. Eventually, because mom got re-married and because she feels a little adventurous, girl moves up north, to be with her dad—try “roughing it” for a while. The new school embraces her, fetishistically, but she feels a bit out of place. And then girl meets boy. He’s intriguing: the painfully shy youngest member of a large foster family. He’s also impossibly handsome—an awkward stud. They get off to a rocky start, but then chemistry kicks in and wham! Next thing she knows and the whole family has gathered around for a meet-and-greet. They’re a lot like the boy (i.e. strange to the nth degree), and he’s embarrassed by them, which is cute, but overall everyone is very welcoming…and very, very, pale. And beautiful, like undead models. (Because—oh yeah—the whole clan, boy and all, are vampires. BTW.)

That’s Twilight, in the beginning, stripped to its parabolic essence. The moral is a spry one that’s stood the test of time—true love is wherever you look for it—and the vessel of its deliverance is as zeitgeist-y as one can get living in a post-Anne Rice world. The source material is (of course; like you don’t already know) the work of one Stephenie Meyer, author extraordinaire. It is her first book in this Girl-Boy romance, Twilight that is the foundation for Twilight, and so on one level the movie was already primed to be a success—at least in terms of how well it stacked up against the book. Because though Meyer’s idea had breezy bite, her prose was still more tin than heat in those first few hundred pages. The movie couldn’t be much worse without being a catastrophe: up was the only direction to go. And so in one sense director Catherine Hardwicke has taken that route: her film is no disaster. But in translating the steamy-repressed-teenage love story of one Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falling for one vampiric Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) onto the screen, no greatness is achieved. You’ll swoon, but you’ll cringe, too.

The swooning first. Hardwicke has only been an active filmmaker for the last five years, but in that time she’s churned out one great film (Thirteen), one really good one (Lords of Dogtown), one blah Christmas tale (The Nativity Story) and now this, which falls somewhere in between. Here, though, her style as a director is almost nearly irrelevant—none of her characteristic flourishes (the frantic, thrusting, probing cinematography; the damaged teenagers) are present; Ron Howard or Uwe Boll could be directing, for all it mattered. The one thing she does do right is position her two young stars at the center of her continually spinning cameras. The result is an indelible takeaway image: Edward and Bella, in perpetual close-up, gazing at the other, about to kiss. The other thing she does is in negative, and that’s to get out of the way of her coltish talents. Both Pattinson and Stewart stumble through their scenes, but in ways that come off, somehow, as amicable, and full of passion. It feels like you’re watching awkward hormones connect—as it should.

And now the cringing. Melissa Rosenberg has been working as a TV writer for a while, and she’s been a part of some prestigious stuff. Her work on the first season of The O.C. and Dexter is among my favorite on both shows. Yet here, as the writer of the Twilight screenplay, she mostly stumbles. In transposing the majority of the action of the novel faithfully, mostly what she realizes isn’t some untapped potential, but rather how cheesy all of the stuff Meyer originally wrote can come across. (To wit, the whole Cam Gigandet plotline? A big fat eh.) The one bright side is that she cooks up most of the dialogue herself, and the majority of it is bouncily morbid and angsty. Still there’s no getting around her sincere plotting: it’s trite, and a bit slavish. There’s a host of other little details to make you squirm, but it’s only the expected stuff (special-effects cooked up on a $37 million-dollar budget; Taylor Lautner; lines still intact from the original story).

Yet as a fusion of horror, thriller, drama, supernatural, weirdo comedy, and pulp romance, Twilight can be a tasty cocktail. Sure, like any lukewarm drink, the taste is a bit funky going down; and afterwards you’ll wonder as you set the empty glass back whether the buzz was worth the hangover. The answer is: maybe…perhaps. A little bit. If there’s an adolescent inside you waiting to be star-struck, or a romantic whose never gone away and is always hungry for more, or even a curious cinephile just wanting to see what two strong female talents do with an undoubtedly retro-feminist fable—whatever: pop on by. At the very least Edward Cullen will make you long for a vampire coven of your very own. And at the very best? You’ll thank God or whoever for casting Pattinson in the oh-so-important role—he is, quite frankly, to die for.