The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2

Posted on November 15, 2012 at 6:00 pm

The “Twilight” series comes to a close with the fifth film based on the four-book supernatural love story from Stephenie Meyer. This one is for the fans, with a loving farewell that includes a romantic recap series of flashbacks and final credits bringing back all the stars of the series.  It will be less satisfying for non Twi-hards, who will have a hard time ignoring the ludicrousness of the storyline.

In the last chapter, Bella (Kristen Stewart) at long last (well, not too long, she just finished high school), married her one true love, Edward (Robert Pattinson), a vampire.  They had a wonderfully romantic but bed-breaking wedding night, and she got pregnant, a surprise to everyone because it was thought to be biologically impossible.  The pregnancy left Bella so frail that childbirth would have killed her if Edward had not kept her alive by turning her into a vampire.  “Breaking Dawn, Part 1” ended with her eyes opening, vampire-ified to electrified amber with a kind of permanent mascara.  “I didn’t expect you to seem so..you,” Jacob says. “Except for the creepy eyes.”

In the past, we saw the “other” world of vampires and wolf-people like Jacob (Taylor Lautner) through Bella’s brown human eyes.  Now we see everything through the hyper-charged senses of the ultimate predator.  Ironically, it is only as a vampire that Bella feels most purely herself — strong, confident, capable.  This is the fork in the road where the fans will stay with it but everyone else may take a detour.  One reason for the sensational popularity of the books is the way they so perfectly capture a young teenager’s fantasy.  That works better when the characters are themselves teenagers.  Trying to project them into the adult world, even one as skewed as the vampire world, is a tougher stretch.

Bella and Edward have an idyllic existence of eternal adolescence, with a life free from work, struggle, and parents.  They do not have to eat or sleep.  They do not have to do anything but have wildly energetic sex and conversations about who loves who more, with banter like “We’re the same temperature now.”  You may ask, “Wait, isn’t there a baby with some kind of nutty name?”  Yes there is, and her name is Renesmee (after the two grandmothers, Renée and Esmé).  When Jacob calls her “Nessie,” Bella gets angry because that’s the Loch Ness monster’s nickname, though it seems likely that it is just another of Jacob’s protective instincts, her birth name being something of a burden.

Bella and Edward-style parenting is not very demanding.  The baby has a full-time staff of loving vampire relatives and an imprinted wolf-guy.  And it turns out that vampire/human children grow in dog years.  The movie, unfortunately, moves rather slowly, with a lot of time bringing in 18 new vampire characters from all over the world to help persuade the vampiric governing body, the Volturi, that they have not broken the law and produced an “immortal child” who could put the community at risk.  All of this leads up to a grand battle across a snowy field, the motley crew of good guy vampires and the robed Volturi.

The endless procession of new characters gets tedious except for a Revolutionary war veteran played by Lee Pace (“Lincoln,” “Pushing Daisies”), who talks about his time with General Custer and has far more electricity on screen than the vampiress who catches his attention with her super-tasing power to jolt anyone.  I also liked Rami Melek (“Night at the Museum,” “Larry Crowne”) as a vampire who can control the elements.  But the sheer volume of new characters made having to remember each one’s special talent like trying to keep track of the Smurfs.

We’ve spent a lot of time with these characters and it is good to see a satisfying resolution to their story.  But I couldn’t help feeling that Meyer had run out of ideas and just tossed in everything she could think of.  My primary reaction at the end was relief that this was the end.

Parents should know that this movie includes vampire violence with battles that include graphic decapitations and other disturbing images, characters injured and killed, sexual references and situations with some nudity, and some language.

Family discussion: What are the biggest changes in Bella’s outlook and abilities from the first installment to the last? How much should she tell Charlie? If you could have one of the special gifts of the characters in the film, which would it be and why?

If you like this, try: the other “Twilight” movies and the books by Stephenie Meyer

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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

Posted on November 17, 2011 at 6:19 pm

In trying to balance the hopes of the passionately devoted fans of the Twilight series (are there any other kind?), who want to see every single word of the books up on the screen and the realities of cinematic storytelling that limit a feature length movie script to about 110 pages, Summit Entertainment has opted for a third priority, the maximization of ticket sales.  The decision to split the fourth and last book of the series into two movies may satisfy the most avid of the Twihards but the result is a movie that is sluggish and dragged out.  And when “Twilight” gets dragged out, that exposes the weakest parts of what even many fans acknowledge is the most problematic of the four books, with too much time to focus on some of the story’s most outlandish absurdities.

In the last episode, 18-year-old human Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) became engaged to 100-plus-year-old vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and this one begins with the delivery of the wedding invitation.  Bella’s mother is excited.  Her father is resigned.  And Jacob (Taylor Lautner), the wolf-boy who shares a mystical connection with Bella, is so angry that he has to take his bad wolf self up to run around Northern Canada for a while.  Meanwhile, Bella has the usual wedding jitters — will she be able to walk in those high, high heels Alice is making her wear?  Will the friends and family on both sides manage to get through the wedding without killing each other — literally?  And will she survive a wedding night with a vampire?  She does not have to worry about whether Jacob will take his shirt off because that happens in the first ten seconds of the film.

Even some Twilight fans admit that author Stephenie Meyer wrote herself into something of a corner by the time she started the last book.  She has said that the idea for the human/vampire love story came from her commitment to writing about a loving relationship where physical intimacy was impossible.  But in the last volume (so far), she decided to go there anyway.  There are some things one can suspend disbelief for more easily in a book than more explicitly portrayed in film and a flashback to a 1930’s Edward watching Elsa Lanchester’s “Bride of Frankenstein” as he waits to pounce on human prey (meticulously chosen, Dexter-style — killers only) elicited laughter from the audience, as did the literally bed-smashing wedding night.  A bigger problem is that four movies in, Bella and Edward still do not have much to talk about beyond how much they love one another and the logistics of their very mixed marriage.  Edward actually researches vampire babies on the internet (a take-me-right-out-of-the-movie product placement from Yahoo search which should inspire nothing more from the audience than a Google search to see whether Yahoo still exists).  And, frustratingly, Meyer begins to bend the rules of her own world, where blood means one thing in one scene and then everyone seems to forget about it in another.  There is a very weird detour into a pro-life/pro-choice debate — is the creature Bella is carrying a child or a fetus?  If, as it appears, continuing the pregnancy means certain death for her, should she have an abortion?

I’m enough of a fan to have enjoyed the wedding scene and even the honeymoon, even with the cleaning crew at the perfect getaway with an ocean view glaring at Edward because in their simple native way they can tell he is a demon.  And I liked seeing Edward respect Bella’s relationship with Jacob.  I laughed, but I was touched, too, when Bella, terribly sick with the pregnancy, is cold, and all three of them realize that only Jacob, the human furnace, can warm her up, and even when he and Edward do a sort of Vulcan mind meld to figure out what Bella and the baby need.  But the best scene in the movie is the one that comes midway through the credits, featuring the much-missed Michael Sheen, letting us know that the final chapter will be less sap and more action.

 

 

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The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Posted on November 30, 2010 at 8:02 am

Things — and people — heat up in this third chapter in the “Twilight” saga. Bella (Kristen Stewart) begins by quoting Robert Frost’s famous poem about whether the world will end in fire or ice. That will be more than a metaphor as she must decide between Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Jacob (Taylor Lautner), both more than human, and both utterly devoted to her. Both, too, have sworn to keep her safe, and at times during this chapter that forces them into a grudging and very uneasy alliance.

Bella met Edward, a vampire, and they realized they loved each other in “Twilight.” And then in “New Moon” being separated and almost losing each other showed them that they could not be apart. But it also gave Bella a chance to grow close to Jacob, a shape-shifter who is part of a wolf pack. In this chapter, Bella and Edward are back together and she wants to become a vampire so they can stay together forever, even though it would mean giving up everyone else she has ever cared about. But Jacob insists that he loves her and is better for her. “You wouldn’t have to change for me,” he tells her.

And at graduation, Bella’s friend Jessica (“Up in the Air’s” Anna Kendrick) addresses the class, telling them that this is not the time to make irrevocable decisions.

Edward does not want her to change. He misses his human life and knows what it would mean to give it up. And his sister Rosalie tells Bella she feels the loss of her dream of living in a normal world. Bella worries that she might lose what it is that Edward loves about her if she becomes a vampire. But if she does not, she will lose him as she grows old while he stays forever young.

Edward and his family are benign vampires, living among humans and confining themselves to a sort of vampire vegetarianism, with animals as their only source of blood. But two groups of evil, destructive vampires are after them, Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard, taking over from Rachelle Lefevre), bent on revenge because Edward killed her lover when he attacked Bella, and the Volturi, a ruling body that destroys any members of the vampire community they believe put them at risk of exposure.

Director David Slade ably takes over from Chris Weitz and Catherine Hardwicke, staying consistent with their vision but demonstrating his own take on the key elements of the story, adolescent longing and primal physical confrontations. Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, continues her skillful adaptation of the books, respectful of the source material but translating it for cinematic story-telling. They maintain a connection that makes the the Northwest settings and the intensity of the fantasy battles feel like a physical manifestation of the between the teenage angst and desire.

Stewart and Pattinson still have the chemistry that launched dozens of magazine covers and Lautner really comes into his own in this chapter, showing more confidence and maturity as his character grows up. Like the book, this chapter has more action, more romance, and more drama, and sets us up very nicely for the grand finale.

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