Harry Potter > Twilight

So as I was having my lazy evening last night and kicking back with my Chinese, I flipped through the channels only to discover that the first Twilight movie was playing on HBO. I had never seen it and, truthfully speaking, had never really had the desire to. However, in keeping with my lazy evening, once it started I was too lazy to change the channel. I have heard the "Twilight is the new Harry Potter" comparisons, which I always scoffed at, but as I never saw the movies or read the books I felt I couldn't really weigh in on the debate.

So what did I think of the Twilight movie? For starters, I nodded off twice during the first hours and had to rewind my DVR to understand what was going on. I thought the movie was pretty terrible. The acting was horrible, the writing was atrocious and the effects were just awful. I'm sure the books are better, as they almost always are, but you won't see me picking one up to read anytime soon because nothing about that storyline hooked me in at all. The premise of the Twilight stories isn't even all that original to me. Ten years ago, when I was a dorky high schooler I loved the show "Roswell" that was on the WB, which to me is pretty much the same premise as Twilight. A quiet girl falls in love with her biology lab partner, a handsome mysterious outsider at the school, after he saves her life using his supernatural abilities. His family and friends are beautiful outcasts from the school who keep to themselves and are unhappy that he revealed their secret to her. Relationship complications ensue because of his supernatural status and the danger it puts her in. Yada yada yada. There seem to be an awful lot of similarities. I'm not saying Roswell was completely original and the show went downhill pretty fast, but to me Twilight is just a new twist on an age-old story and it's not even told all that well. I'm all for a good love story, but the chemistry in the movie was pretty nonexistent and Robert Pattinson was just downright creepy! There is absolutely no comparison to Harry Potter!

In Harry Potter - both the books and the movies - are very original and have more layers to them than just a girl who can't live without a boy. I'm all for romance like I said, but come on. Even if it just in a movie, hearing the words "I would rather die than live without you" just make me want to vomit. Perhaps the books shed a little more light on this, but Bella doesn't seem to have much of an identity outside of her infatuation with Edward. Not something I really want to see in my heroine. I love all the themes in Harry Potter - friendship, death, loss, free will, prejudice, bigotry, and love in so many different forms. You have parental love, unrequited love, platonic love, sibling love, first loves, crushes. It's not just this over-the-top "I can't live without you" and "we're meant to be together" kind of love. It's characters have substance and depth, which are brought out wonderfully in the books, but that you can see brought to the screen through the wonderful acting of men like Alan Rickman and Michael Gambon. I also love the reality of adolescence as it is depicted in the books over the years. Not everyone is a new girl who automatically makes friends and gets the most handsome guy in school. I'm a tried and true history dork and do not read very much fiction at all, but I love and have reread the HP books.

My last reason for why I think Harry Potter is superior to Twilight (and then I promise I'm done) is because I think it's fanbase stretches far and wide and it has much more reach. I remember being so surprised at my old job at how many teenage boys dug the Harry Potter movies and read the books. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many men who have sat down with the Twilight books or voluntarily gone to see either of the films. Harry Potter is something I can share with my friends, my mom, my kids (when I have them), my students, even my boyfriend.

As I said, I'm sure the books do the Twilight story a lot more justice, but I like the multi-layered story in HP much more than the single story that was presented to me in Twilight. I was hoping the movie would help shed some light on the Twilight craze and why so many of my students still walk around with vampire shirts or binders that have "Team Jacob" written on them, but it did not. If anything it explains why so many of my kids think a boy will solve all their problems and be the answer to everything. Harry Potter wins. Harry Potter always wins!

PS - just a random rant: why weren't vampires this popular when I was in high school and got ridiculed for liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (still in my opinion the best show EVER)