Twilight is every movie fan's favourite whipping boy, a film series devoid of objective quality and good morals, and Robert Pattinson's meteoric rise as a heart-throb is at the centre of the saga's cinematic legacy. As a result, the name who would be "Rpatz" has received an excessive amount of vitriol from non-fans, but I just cannot subscribe to that attitude.
It's clear for anyone who has actually sat down with a Twilight movie (and I suspect at least half of the vocal critics have not sat through a single one) that Pattinson doesn't care about this series and is incapable of taking the material seriously. This side-eyed approach to the source leads to a lot of great, unintentional comedy. Yes, this is me defending Robert Pattinson.
Hate all you like, but you have to respect Pattinson's habit of leveraging his Twilight fame to attach himself to creatively interesting projects and not banal audience-bait like Taylor Lautner with Abduction (emphasis on "ab").
He will headline David Cronenberg's crazed looking Cosmopolis and just this week attached himself to the psychological thriller, Mission: Blacklist, where he will be tasked with the job of hunting Saddam Hussein.
Next on his agenda is The Rover, which will be writer/director David Michod's follow-up to the critically acclaimed Animal Kingdom. The crime thriller stars Guy Pearce as a man who hunts a gang of thieves when they steal his car, the exact nature of what drives him to do this is currently a mystery.
Pattinson will play one of the thieves, named Reynolds, who was badly injured after a confrontation with police. Given Michod's effortless control of a morally ambiguous atmosphere, I can imagine this film forcing audiences to switch sympathies between the two different camps as the story progresses.
The script, penned by Michod, is based on an original idea from Michod and Animal Kingdom star Joel Edgerton.
If directors as non-commercial as Cronenberg and Michod want to work with Pattinson, I have no reason to write him off just yet.
Source: MTV
