'Twilight' better than you may expect

An overnight publishing phenomenon, "Twilight" didn't take long to hit the movies. Stephenie Meyer's thick young adult novel was published in 2005, took off like a bat in the night, and arrives in theaters today.

That's nothing; Meyer has already cranked out three literary sequels. As the movie industry holds its collective breath and whispers the magic words "Harry Potter" in anxious anticipation, the film franchise stands ready to lift off.

And it will likely soar. Fittingly gloomy but with a smart amount of humor, "Twilight" deftly creates a world of high-school angst and supernatural swooning.

Almost nobody seeing the movie will be unaware of its subject, but it takes the film almost an hour to get to the point: vampires. 17-year-old Bella (Kristen Stewart) moves from sunny Phoenix, Ariz., to live with her father, a small-town policeman in the rainy Olympic Peninsula town of Forks.

Yes, that's right -- good old Forks is the hotbed of all things vampiric. (Now they'll know what it feels like to be the new Twin Peaks.) Bella meets hunky Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a brooding member of an extremely pale family of bloodsuckers.

He and his family don't drink human blood, however, which makes them tragic rather than monstrous. Unfortunately, someone in the vicinity doesn't follow the same rules, and locals are being knocked off.

Bella and Edward can't keep away from each other. He informs her that "Your scent is like a drug to me," which is not exactly "Here's looking at you, kid," or "You had me at hello," but is nevertheless destined to go into the movie-quote hall of fame.

Things go almost entirely as you'd expect from there. Yet the movie is better than expected.

A key to this is the director, Catherine Hardwicke, whose unusual output has shown a sensitivity to quivering teen passions: "Thirteen," "Lords of Dogtown" and "The Nativity Story." She's not the kind of slick Hollywood director who just keeps cranking out the same old thing.

So the movie has an offhand, wry quality, and almost every frame looks rainy and gloomy. More importantly, she respects the heart-in-throat emotions of teenagers who don't know what to do with their passions yet.

On the down side, the movie's tone wobbles after the vampire revelation (it can't help but snicker at the customs of "vegetarian" vampires), and Hardwicke isn't very good with action. Some of the supernatural stuff -- Edward's hyper-speed running, for instance -- comes off awkwardly. In fact (and this is something I liked about the movie), there are few conventional "action" sequences at all; this is about the people.

The locations include various spots on the Washington and Oregon coasts. I have to credit the movie for including the term "vitamin R" to refer to a certain locally-brewed beer. That's good research.

The actors are well-chosen. Kristen Stewart, from "Into the Wild" and "Zathura," has been on the verge of breaking through for a while, and she's just right as a lonely teen; Pattinson inspired sustained bouts of whooping from a preview audience, and seems destined for millions of pin-up posters.

It may be no world classic, but "Twilight" is better than expected, and probably better than it needed to be, considering its built-in audience and inevitable sequels. The ending leaves no doubt of future bloody adventures.