Twilight (2008) Soundtrack: A Time Capsule of the Tweenage Phenomenon
Dude Notes: This one was requested by my good friend Meg, and is my first film soundtrack review. Here goes nothing!
When I first was contacted to write this review, I thought to myself: How the hell am I going to do this? I was never big on movie soundtracks growing up, preferring instead the much more user-friendly musical soundtracks a la Phantom of the Opera or The Lion King. Those, at least, knew how to tell a story through music. Or, that’s at least what I thought before diving into this.
The soundtrack to Twilight doesn’t really do the best job of telling the story of the film (or the book, for that matter; a hopelessly romantic love triangle between a vampire, werewolf, and a mortal girl who just can’t seem to choose between the two of them for a solid two novels out of the four book-long series), but that’s not really the point here. Most film soundtracks are meant to be there as backdrops to the film itself, noticeable exceptions aside (looking at you, Howard Shore), and this one does its job. Songs like “Supermassive Black Hole” and “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” do a fairly decent job at covering both sides of the “love” aspect of the film, the former being a testament to the early, exciting, forbidden love between Edward and Bella, and the latter showcasing the more mellow emotions that often blossom between two young (or in this case, young-ish) teenagers who truly have feelings for one another.
The rest of these songs, barring Perry Farrell’s god-awful “Go All the Way (Into the Twilight)”* are more than serviceable at displaying the angst both the author and the film’s producers definitely want the intended audience of this film to feel, with two cuts by Paramore being highlights: “Decode”, about how Edward can’t read Bella’s mind, and how that affects their relationship; and “I Caught Myself”, presumably about whether or not Bella really wants to continue the relationship she’s in with a dangerous vampire who may or may not one day either turn her or drink her blood, killing her. So, bottom line: Would I recommend this? Probably not, unless you enjoy compilations about supernatural teenage angst; which, in this day and age, is anyone’s guess. Though I will say this: it is a fascinating document in a really weird time in American cultural history, a period of five years where this and its sequels was pretty much all anyone really wanted to talk about, if you were in middle or high school, and that’s definitely worth something to the right people.
*This song is so bad that I’m convinced they added it in here strictly because it had the name of the move in the title.