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Ladies and gentlemen, here it is: the perfect review-proof movie. Twilight‘s going to make a ton of money and there’s nothing you can do about it.

What the hell happened to vampires?

Once upon a time, vampires were little better than walking corpses slinking out of graveyards to kill, spreading plague wherever they went. The 19th century saw them revamped into more sophisticated killers and monsters, but even then they were still most assuredly killers and monsters. Their thin veneer of civility was just that: a veneer. But Bram Stoker, John Polidori and the rest gave us some hint of tragedy, that perhaps these killers and monsters weren’t altogether happy with the whole undead-parasite thing. And they could love, if poorly.

Nowadays vampires are even more diluted. What was once a singular predator both frightening and tragic has become something more like the boyfriend your parents don’t approve of. Anne Rice and Joss Whedon have a lot to answer for.

But in Twilight, adapted from the first of a series of tweener-favorite books, even the parents end up liking sullen, pale Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). In fact, it’s hard to figure out why Edward’s sullen at all: he’s super-strong, super-fast, super-telepathic, and super-handsome for all time. He can mack on all the teenage girls he wants and not be bothered by the 100-year age difference. His family-clan of vampires only feeds from animals, and they do fun family things like play baseball together during thunderstorms. (Yes, Twilight features vampire baseball.) And the frequently overcast weather of Forks, Wa., keeps the Cullen clan free from sunlight. It’s a good thing, too, because you know what happens to vampires when sunlight hits them, right?

Right: They get even prettier.

So being a vampire is sort of like being in the X-Men, except instead of everyone wanting to lynch you, they think you’re sexy and mysterious. In fact, in the movie’s interminable 122 minutes, not a single fang is seen. (That would be threatening.) This is, quite literally, a defanged vampire movie.

(I personally despise puns, but Twilight makes it hard on me, OK? Bear with me.)

But Twilight is not about Edward, or at least not entirely about him. It’s about Bella (Kristen Stewart, actually quite good) moving to Forks to live with her dad the Sheriff (one of many older male figures with paternal/protective roles) and twigging to this unusual Cullen clan. Her new friends fill her in: the Cullens have a bunch of adopted kids, all of whom are beautiful and pale and dating each other. (Yes.) There’s three boys and two girls, leaving Edward single and thus unhappy and abnormal. Like most fan fiction, the biggest problem anyone has in Twilight is being single.

“Being single” is, actually, the only thing resembling a thematic conflict throughout the movie. Any English 101 teacher will tell you that conflict is the essence of drama: Without some hardship to overcome, there is no “journey” for the hero to take, nothing to sacrifice, and nothing to gain. In short, there’s no reason to care.

Twilight takes this most basic formula and tosses it right the hell out the window. The first 90 minutes are spent with Bella trying to figure out what the deal is with Edward, which is kind of silly, as anyone who has any chance of setting foot in that theater—or indeed has seen the poster—already knows he’s a damn vampire and let’s get on with the vampiring already. There’s a weak gesture at conflict in the movie’s final reel involving a pair of “rogue” vampires (they actually hunt people, you see) who hunt Bella to piss off Edward. (Bella, an otherwise refreshingly neurosis-free teenage girl, is Edward’s damsel in distress no less than two times.)

But that conflict is incidental, and feels tacked on: even after a lethal fight all the way back in Bella’s home town of Phoenix, everyone sorts it out in time for Prom, where every single major character is now paired up with the person they “should” be with . . . except the vampire who’s lost her loved one, and is now the new villain. So that’s the story.

I mentioned fan fiction earlier because “fan fiction” is exactly what Twilight is. No one really gives up anything to gain anything else. Edward is tragic only insofar as that makes him hesitant and interesting, not “tragic” in the sense that he suffers any real pain or regrets any decisions. Bella suffers incidental pain but gets everything she wants. This “everyone becomes friends with everyone” thing is a trademark of bad fiction, and I’m inclined to put the blame on children of divorce, who long for the angry people in their lives to let bygones be bygones . . . but I’m a child of divorce, and that kind of no-harm-no-foul storytelling drives me bonkers. So who knows.

But, you know, I can’t be as mean as I want to be. Twilight is pure in its pursuit of hitting the pleasure centers of its audience. It’s like a “World’s Craziest Car Crashes” show for pre-sexual teenage girls: all release and no tension. Edward and Bella’s idea of romance is to talk and talk and talk and talk; there are no fewer than three montages where they do exactly that, interrupted by the occasional chest-heaving longing stares, and one steamy little kiss. The book, I understand, is far creepier in its unintentional implications, but the movie is damn near as naïve as the people who will love it. In that way, Twilight is very good at what it does.

Make no mistake: This is not a good movie, and your time and money would be better spent elsewhere. (Your daughters’, too.) Stewart and Pattinson are both better than this material, which is leaden and uninteresting to anyone who’s already been through high school. There is no actual story to speak of, just a series of dull revelations. As Baby’s First Vampire Story, it’s only offensive in that it lacks the teeth—dammit, another pun—that the vampire genre demands. I’m not the Genre Nazi, but if you’re going to use vampires in your story, use vampires in your story.

But the people who want to see Twilight don’t give a damn. Before the screening started, there was—I kid you not—a performance by a three-girl Twilight filk band that started every song by saying something like, “This song is about how Edward felt when he saw Bella talking to Jacob.” All three girls looked far too smart to be involved in that sort of thing, and maybe someday they’ll realize that. In the meantime, have fun, girls. And maybe, next time you’re in a bookstore, skip past the Twilight table and look for a guy named Stoker or a woman named Rice.

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