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 opted 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 entirety of the movie’s runtime, New Moon not only made the movies less engaging, but it also resulted 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 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 offer 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, is 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 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 genuinely tortured immortals whose lust for power has consumed everything they cared 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. All it took was a few threatening scenes to establish Twilight's James as a killer villain, but the Volturi never receive these when introduced in the sequel and as such come off as a toothless, ineffectual non-threat. It’s a shame given the talented actors playing the coven, and doubly unfortunate when they are called upon to be the primary antagonists of the entire saga by the ending of Breaking Dawn.
Twilight’s Good Vampires Were Wasted Too
Alice Cullen’s Breaking Dawn ending plot hole). However, explaining that every vampire in the Twilight universe has unique and often more impressive abilities could have grounded these moments, if the adaptations had only taken the time to treat their best vampire characters better.
