[Review] – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2

Title: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2
Year: 2012
Director: Bill Condon
Writer: Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Mackenzie Foy, Ashley Greene, Maggie Grace, Michael Sheen, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed, Kellan Lutz, Jamie Campbell Bower, Dakota Fanning, Billy Burke, Lee Pace, Joe Anderson
MPAA Rating: PG-13, sequences of violence including disturbing images, some sensuality and partial nudity
Runtime: 115 min
IMDb Rating: 5.9
Rotten Tomatoes: 46%
Metacritic: 52

My relationship with the Twilight franchise is a love-hate one. I read all the books when they came out and thought they ranged from mediocre to decent, and I’ve seen all of the movies so far and thought they’ve been okay. It’s just that even though the movies are fine and I love Kristen Stewart, they’re movies that pretty much no one outside the core audience of the books will really enjoy all that much. That’s what made the Harry Potter films so amazing, that you didn’t have to be that invested in the books to love them. Here, if you love the books then you’ll go gaga for the films, but if you haven’t read the books or if you have but merely thought they were okay then chances are you’ll just think they’re utterly forgettable.

[Trailer] – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2

It’s under 80 seconds, but we now have our first official look at a trailer for the upcoming The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, the concluding chapter to that vampire franchise that will leave the field wide open for Katniss to be the new ruler of tweens across the world.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1

Title: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
Year: 2011
Director: Bill Condon
Writer: Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Nikki Reed, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Jackson Rathbone, Julia Jones, Booboo Stewart, Billy Burke, Sarah Clarke, MyAnna Buring, Maggie Grace, Casey LaBow, Michael Sheen, Jamie Campbell Bower
MPAA Rating: PG-13, disturbing images, violence, sexuality/partial nudity and some thematic elements
Runtime: 117 min
IMDb Rating: 4.8
Rotten Tomatoes: 26%
Metacritic: 45

 

I have a weird kind of relationship with the Twilight franchise where I don’t know if I love it or not. I read all of the books the second each one of them came out, which means when I read them and imagined the stuff in my head I didn’t have Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson or Taylour Lautner to play the characters, and I liked all books just fine, Eclipse being my favorite. So of course I would see the films, and the first one was just okay, I would have given it a B- if I had graded it; the second film was a tiny bit better though still a B-; and then the third film was a marked improvement, and I gave it a B grade upon reviewing it in July of last year. So, what I’m trying to say is that the Twilight films, though still none being really great like the Harry Potter films were for a decade, have been getting better and better in my opinion, which filled me up with hope upon going into The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, the first half of the final book in the series, that splitting-the-final-book-in-two strategy one they obviously took from the Harry Potter playbook.

A lot was made about the director hunt for this film, with people like Gus Van Sant being courted which would have been really interesting, and Sofia Coppola having reportedly turned down the opportunity because she only wanted to do one half of the final two installments and not commit to both, my love for her is unending so I would have loved to see how that turned out. The gig, of course, eventually went to Bill Condon, and I thought that was an inspired enough choice, this is the guy that directed Gods and Monsters, Kinsey and Dreamgirls, all very different films that showed the guy can handle quite a range with a consistent level of success. However, even though I would still recommend the film, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 doesn’t continue to the trend of improving on the previous installment, representing a decline over the third entry in the franchise.

It’s just a slow film that has a lot of moments that you can’t help but laugh at even though they were obviously not made to elicit chuckles. The dialogue is just so stiff and the pacing so off that you can’t really connect with the film for extended periods of time, Mr. Condon pausing the action every ten minutes or so to give us a slow-motion look at some gorgeous person, that stuff just detracts a lot of any regular film, by which I’m only saying that these films aren’t regular, they are consumed in excessive amounts by a rabid fanbase that lives for those kinds of shots. Not to mention that I have issue with that PG-13 rating, I mean, I never once suspected that Summit would go for an R rating for a film that relies on the hoards of tweens that live and die for their allegiance to either Team Edward or Team Jacob (it’s already grossed nearly $645 million worldwide), but when you read the final book there are a lot of pivotal moments, and two of them are in this film, the honeymoon sex scene and the birth scene, and you can’t really do those moments right if you’re making a PG-13 movie, I’m really hoping there’s a director’s cut somewhere out there that will find its way on blu-ray.

Those are my main issues with this film really, and they’re things that are only off because of how the film needed to be, which is shame because other than that I actually think Mr. Condon did exactly what was asked of him, and did it well. The film is certainly well-made, and handles this really huge story in a nice way, delivering a two-hour film that’s really loaded and knows how to work both the campy elements and the romantic ones, even though a few of them will earn a few laughs they shouldn’t have, that’s just the fault of the dialogue. But the thing is that the loyal fans of the film will absolutely love those moments, and it’s pretty spectacular to get a film that has tapped into the vein of its fans so well, and even if you’re not a fan you still have to respect that.

Ridiculous as the dialogue may be most of the times, distractingly cheesy as the effects may get, stiff as the acting may appear, I will say one thing, Kristen Stewart’s pretty great in this one. I’ve always loved her as an actress, I think she has such an extraordinary amount of talent that she’s just bound to really give us a masterful performance sooner rather than later, obviously Twilight‘s not the platform for that, but that she makes so much out of the material she’s given here is really terrific. The film opens with those gorgeous invitations to the Bella-Edward nuptials that will fans squealing over the Carolina Herrera dress, and it also opens with Jacob receiving that invitation and ripping his shirt off in anger, because that’s just how these films go, and those squeals will get multiplied tenfold by the hoards of thirteen year-olds that have their moms paying for them to express a really huge amount of lust at such a young age.

Even if you can’t take this whole spectacle all that seriously you still have to be in awe of the heights it has reached. You have a guy falling in love with a baby, a girl losing her virginity in a way that may also cause her to lose her life and subsequently experience an accelerated pregnancy of a demonic baby that’s eating away her insides. The fact that I kind of bought into like half of those crazy things means that the film did something good, I think, and Mr. Pattinson and certainly Ms. Stewart appear to have really grown into these roles, and their own feelings about their superstardom and themselves (they’re a couple in real-life) seem to have added to how they play these roles. So we jet off to the coast of Brazil where the Cullen’s own a private island (natch), that’s where the aforementioned sex scene happens in disappointing fashion since you never fear for Bella’s life as much as you do for the bed they break.

After that honeymoon part we experience the pregnancy with Bella, and the final twenty minutes or so of the movie actually work hard to really amp up the craziness, and they do just that, as Bella starts becoming consumed by the child she’s bearing that will probably kill her, as the werewolves start camping outside to try to kill the unholy baby that’s about to come to the world, so much stuff happens in such campy manner that you can’t help but kind of dig it. The dialogue is horrible, but there are some nice moments that Mr. Condon somehow to brings out, and even if I didn’t think this one was as good as the third film in the franchise, I still really want to watch the final chapter, and I recommend this one because this is what Twilight is, a really epic and frantic melodrama about vampires with soap-operaish acting.

Grade: B-

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Title: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Year: 2010
Director: David Slade
Writer: Melissa Rosenberg based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Bryce Dallas Howard, Billy Burke, Dakota Fanning, Ashley Greene, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Xavier Samuel, Sarah Clarke, Anna Kendrick
MPAA Rating: PG-13, intense sequences of action and violence, and some sensuality
Runtime: 124 min
Major Awards: –
IMDb Rating: 4.8
Rotten Tomatoes: 52%

I will give The Twilight Saga: Eclipse a B grade, not because it’s a B movie, but because it’s a B- movie in what has been a C grade franchise, and since I actually like the source materials I thought this was great and decided to bump it up a grade, no but really, this is the best entry in the popular franchise, a franchise that has already made $1.7 billion and has this one still rolling in the cash, and a two-part finale to the series which will have the first part bowing next year, so yes, it’s a pretty profitable franchise even if the films aren’t good, as was the case with the first two entires, it’s a franchise that will consistently break midnight-screenings and opening-day box office records because of it’s rabid fanbase, and it’s a franchise that, with Eclipse, finally has a film that successfully blends the romantic side with the action stuff, and that’s really what this is all about, the dialogue will probably never be there, Stephenie Meyers’ novels were nice because of the description of the feelings, the dialogue was never anywhere near great, but this is a film that doesn’t need to make any new converts, it just needs to keep the millions it already has in check, and this one will do wonders for that.

The previous installment in the franchise, New Moon, I didn’t like at all because the storyline was way too thin for me to fully appreciate, in Eclipse the story, if anything, may just be too loaded, and that’s good, that’s something I’d much rather have because it means this film will be far more entertaining, and this one was actually released in the summer, so that’s something it should definitely aim to be, and the action sequences are cool and everything, and Kristen Stewart is pretty awesome, and David Slade does a pretty good job at directing this one, even though a part of me was thinking about how it would have turned out had Drew Barrymore been given the directing duties, like she once was rumored to, that’s how much I liked the stuff she did in Whip It.

My main problem with this one though was, as I said, the dialogue, which was just so damn uninspired, and this is a film that deals a lot with the Edward-Bella-Jacob love triangle, and that has a lot of conversations between any two from the several duo combinations you can make out of those three, and the fact that the dialogue is so boring takes away from the potential of those conversations and just has them drag on, some times uncomfortably so, but the target demographic won’t care, girls will still scream and swoon over them and swear they’ll remain virgins till a vampire or werewolf comes along, and they won’t care that the conversations lead to nothing because Jacob can’t apparently withstand to have one conversation with his shirt on, fortunately for us men Kristen Stewart is pretty beautiful herself, but she’s too talented an actress for us to be okay with just seeing her and not seeing her acting well like she can.

Both Jacob and Edward are now admittedly in love with Bella, and she’s pretty torn between the two herself, but then this vampire, Victoria, who has been creating new vampires on her own in Seattle comes along and puts a halt to the love party and the good vampires have to form and alliance with the werewolves against the bad vampires to save Bella’s life, which probably made Bella feel pretty damn special. And the action scenes were pretty good, they were well choreographed and all, but I had a problem with the CGI employed on the werewolves, you see, I, especially considering all the hype they built on how cool they looked, didn’t really think they looked cool enough, or actually, maybe they did look cool, but they didn’t feel real, or, well, convicing to me, and that kept me from truly delving into those scenes as much as I could have.

However, as I said, this is a film that fans of the franchise, I would hope, will love more than they loved the previous two, the fact is that we know from reading the books all that goes on inside the heads of our characters, all the feelings that aren’t said in the insipid dialogue, and that enables us to promptly fill in the gaps without hesitating and pausing to think about how it’s being shown on-screen, and the reality is that it wasn’t shown that well on-screen and those who haven’t read the series may catch on that more than those of us who have, but who cares, Edward still has that glare that has chaste tweens crying over, Jacob is still shirtless, and Stephenie Meyer is still in possession of the erotic dreams of said teen girls, even if those dreams don’t really include any sex, we’ll have to wait for the two-part finale for that to happen, and let’s just hope they go for the R rating on that one.

Grade: B