Beginnings

So over Labor Day weekend, TYG took me to Eclipse, the third in the Twilight series of movies. It was, to my surprise, much better than the first film.
We’ve got more battles between the good and evil vampires, more clashes between werewolves and vampires and Jacob’s pursuit of Bela makes the romantic side a lot more interesting (Edward still seems to me a very bland character—the male equivalent of the Dream Girl in so many movies).
In a sense, I think part of the problem I had with Twilight when I saw it stemmed from the problems a lot of first-in-series stories have. When you start a series, you have to set things up: Introduce the characters, introduce the concepts and the rules, establish the setting. And that can take up so much time things can”t really get going.
In some series, there’s also the problem that the creators don’t know where it’s going (not being familiar with Meyer’s print works, I’ve no idea if she had the whole thing outlined from the start). Orson Scott Card has pointed out how much Snape changes from a stock harsh teacher to a much more complex character over the course of the Harry Potter books and makes a persuasive argument Rowling didn’t have his role mapped out from the start (I don’t have the link, sorry).
Comic books are particularly prone to this. Almost nobody meets their arch-enemy in their first story; the Green Goblin and Sinestro (for Spider-Man and Green Lantern respectively) didn’t show up for more than a year into the respective series. In origin retellings, they’re invariably moved into the early stages to rev things up: Peter’s spider was mutated by some of Norman Osborne’s research (I think Ultimate Spider Man introduced that idea) and Sinestro is Hal Jordan’s teacher, then adversary.
(This doesn’t always work, I note: Doom’s origin in the same cosmic accident as the Fantastic Four in the movie series is a lot duller than his comics background. And the most recent retelling of GL’s origin ties in not only Sinestro but the villainous Hector Hammond and Black Hand, which I found a little much.)
Of course, there are lots of series openers that work very well: Star Wars (I refuse to call the first film Episode IV), the first Harry Dresden and Anita Blake novels, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So I’m not inclined to go “Well, it’s only the first” and forgive the flaws.
But given the movies picked up so much, I won’t bitch about the flaws in the first one too much either.