"Twilight" might be this year's most religious film – but you wouldn't know that by reading the reviews. It's no secret that Stephenie Meyer, author of the series of teen vampire romance novels on which the film is based, is a Mormon. Meyer readily admits that her lifelong membership in the Church of Latter Day Saints has had an important influence on her work. Yet, somehow, critics of the film version of her first book, which debuted to $70 million in ticket sales this past weekend, completely and utterly overlooked the religious themes that make the flick much more than a silly rehearsal of the tired boy-meets-girl teen melodrama.

In case you're still unfamiliar with the "Twilight" story: Teenage Bella moves to Forks, Washington, to live with her dad. Then she meets the preternaturally pale and brooding Edward Cullen, one of a motley family of equally blanched children adopted by the local doctor (who couldn't resemble a youth pastor more). The two leads fall in love, and eventually Bella figures out that Edward is not merely odd; in fact, he's a vampire who is insatiably horny – sorry, thirsty –for Bella's blood.

Edward can't ever let himself "lose control" with Bella because he might, as Roger Ebert put it, "sink his fangs in just a little, and not be able to stop." You see, Edward and his family form a unique coven of vampires who have sworn off human blood. Instead, they satisfy themselves with a sanguine Ensure sucked from the necks of four-legged animals.  

For the most part, critics have dismissed "Twilight" as superficial and stale, the kind of media offering that might follow Gossip Girl on the CW --"a slog of adolescent angst," as the AP's critic put it. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times even went so far as to summarize the film in teen text message speak: "OMG he's SO HOT!! Does he like ME?? Will he KILL me??? I don't CARE!!! :)" Perhaps this is because Dargis wants to collapse the film's complex moral quandaries into the simple idea that "there's something worse than death, especially for teenagers: sex."

If this were really what the film was about, Dargis would be right to claim that "the story's moral undertow keeps dragging [it] down." But if she'd just look a bit deeper she'd see that the film is as much an exposition on free will (it takes place in Forks, Washington, after all) as it is propaganda for abstinence until marriage. The film's "moral undertow" is actually what makes it brilliant.

"I really think that's the underlying metaphor of my vampires," Meyer told Time magazine in April. "It doesn't matter where you're stuck in life or what you think you have to do; you can always choose something else. There's always a different path."

As William Morris of the Mormon arts and culture site A Motley Vision points out, the Mormon concept of free will or agency is a distinctive feature of the faith. Though he's not sure Meyer does the best job of exploring it, Morris, unlike other critics, at least notes the presence of the question of agency in Meyer's stories. Morris says he wishes the media would focus on themes like this when talking about Mormonism instead of obsessively covering the Mormon's-can't-even-drink-coffee story, which reduces their faith to a summary of "what we don't do rather than what we believe."

Those critics that caught the abstinence theme (and shockingly, there weren't many of them) did little more than ridicule or dismiss it. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "True to Meyer's Mormon beliefs, there is neither hanky panky nor panky nor anything resembling a third or even a second base between Bella and her dreamboat." But Phillips, like other critics, fails to see the absolute genius of this plot point. Meyer deserves credit for achieving something next to impossible: She makes abstinence sexy.

Not surprisingly, the only journalist to really dig past the forbidden love story into the sometimes profound religious subtext of the film was Religion News Service's Steve Rabey, who took the time to call an expert on Mormonism to figure out what this movie is really about.

"[A]nyone who is familiar with the Book of Mormon can also discern deeper theological themes, from the Mormon reinterpretation of the Fall of humankind…to the theme of overcoming natural man, which we can see when Bella wrestles with her desires and decides not to become a vampire," Jana Riess, author of Mormonism for Dummies, told Rabey.

Maybe it's unreasonable to expect film critics to be up on the fine points of the Book of Mormon – but that's not all the mainstream media are missing. There's a heavy helping of sexism as well as religious naïveté factoring into these reviews. Again and again, critics remarked that teenage girls would "surely squeal with delight" at the film's bloodthirsty star, Robert Pattinson. But why is it so difficult for reviewers to see that teenage girls might love this franchise just as much for its thoughtful treatment of the existential and religious dilemmas with which they struggle?

Jennifer Hahn, whose work has appeared in Ms. magazine and Los Angeles CityBeat, is currently a master's degree candidate in specialized journalism at USC.