Twilight: Eclipse (1.5 out of 5)

The Cullens must just about be one of the most understanding families in all of cinema. Not only do they like their son Edward’s girlfriend Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), but they also accept her mortality and dedicate their entire effort as a family unit to protecting her against other vampires who want nothing but to make lunch of her to the point where they even make a pact with their enemies eternal, the werewolves, in order to help fiend these baddies off of poor Bella. At a certain point, when the family risks danger and disownment by betraying some sort of unspoken vampire code in order to fend for this girl, didn’t one of the elder Cullens ever think, hey, maybe our son could do better?

The werewolves, of course, also have reason to band together with the vampires because, well A) they don’t like vampires and the chance to kill some without breaking their ancient treaty is mighty appealing, but also because B) one of them, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) is kind of in love with Bella as well, in which case, in order for this story to work, Bella Swan would just about need to not only be the best thing since sliced bread, she’d also have to put that legacy into question. Certainly Bella, if worthy of these male pursuits, could, among other things, slice a loaf of bread or two, couldn’t she?

But the thing is, Bella’s nothing really that special. She’s a pale, skinny kid in blue jeans and a hoodie. I’m sure she’s a nice girl, but certainly not the type that would take your breath away after 100 of years of meeting cute high school girls. In fact, what comes out in David Slade’s Twilight: Eclipse, the third in the series, is that she’s kind of selfish and stupid. There’s a scene where she goes to visit her mother in Florida early in the film because, after graduation, she intends to become a vampire, marry Edward (Robert Pattinson) and never be heard from again. For a graduation gift mom gives Bella a quilt stitched together from all the T-shirts she got from their travels, to which she also chimes in that hopefully they can ad many more in the future. You realize here exactly what Bella wants to give up and have to wonder, why? She basically wants to give up the rest of her life for what symbolically comes down to sex. Unless of course Edward Cullen is the greatest thing since...

It’s at this point that one realizes that the Twilight films have been missing everything that, as far as fad franchises go, has made the Harry Potter books/films so special for so many years. Part of the joy of Harry Potter was in kids exploring a world unknown to them and discovering things about themselves, abilities and powers, but also exploring how they related to the everyday woes of growing up. Harry may have fought giant snakes in the basement but that didn’t make the stress of asking a girl to the Yule Ball any easier.

There’s nothing like that in the Twilight series that grounds it in some sort of plausible reality and provides an entry point as a way to care about these characters or anything that happens to them. Bella broods, Edward mopes, Jacob snarls and both men try to convince the emotionally confused Bella that their love is the best for her. And then Bella contemplates this, and changes her mind, and then changes it back, and then is mad at Edward, but then still likes him more, as the story, over the course of three books/films, still pretends to build to some important event that always feels just over the horizon but never manages to happen. The only difference between Eclipse and it’s predecessors Twilight and New Moon is that in this one, for fifteen minutes or so towards the end, something actually happens.

Did Stephenie Meyer really expand all this confusion, moping, assessing and reassessing over the entire span of three books? Has Hollywood really dedicated six hours to introducing these characters while they shuffle around in self pity while absolutely nothing even close to resembling drama ever comes close to happening? If Meyer wasn’t as incompetent a writer as she is, she would surely know that each work, although belonging to a singular network that propels the same story forward, needs to be self-sufficient as a complete whole insomuch as that, when it ends, the audience feels content in knowing that this chuck of the story is over and has passed through something even so slightly as resembling a beginning, middle and end. Instead Meyer and painfully faithful screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg are trickless magicians; always pulling air out of empty top hats. When the credits role over the close of Eclipse you get to thinking: oh great, now I have to wait for the next film for the action to actually start rolling.

You can’t blame any of this on the film’s players. They are, after all, working with source material about as awful as any there has ever been. Director David Slade (30 Days of Night) throws away the autumn hue of Chris Weitz’s New Moon in order for a darker, more murky look without returning to the ugly blue tint of Catherine Hardwick’s original Twilight film and also provides a climatic battle which is only the second most incomprehensible action sequence this summer. Stewart and Pattinson are about as good as they have been any other time, filling the role while making you realize they probably deserve much better, Dakota Fanning, still in cameo mode, shows up to assert why she probably isn’t the best choice to play villains and Lautner is still giving the kind of self-important performance that only a truly terrible actor can give when they fail to realize how bad they are playing.

And that’s it. The story will continue in 2011 when Bill Condon, the series’ most prestigious director takes a stab at the fourth and final chapter, in which maybe something will actually happen, although, considering the film will but cut into two parts, it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing any life (no pun intended) from this franchise until 2012. Although, at this point, I think Edward and Jacob should cut their loses, find one of their own kind and let Bella realize that having a boyfriend when you’re in high school shouldn’t really be this much work.

Retrospective Review: Twlight: New Moon (1.5 out of 5)

I feel like I've been in a completely different world for the past four days. I haven't really read anything that has been going on here. I accepted posts but didn't respond to them because I didn't have time so I'm sorry. To anyone who did post thank you. I still have to do that whole Versitile Blogger thing for both Film Geek and Yojimbo. Such pressure. Anyway, I'm still not back into the swing of things and have many original pieces coming up soon, but until I get back into it, here's a review of New Moon. Expect my review of Eclipse within the next couple days.
Bella Swann (Kristen Stweart) may just be the unluckiest character in all of literary history. She certainly is close to the most pathetic if not naive as well. How unfortunate it is, after all, to have to fill the gaping hole left in your heart from a departed vampire lover with a new werewolf lover. Certainly there has to be a mortal boy or two at her small town Washington high school, no? That would certainly solve most if not all of her emotional afflictions, which in New Moon, the follow-up to Catherine Hardwick’s Twilight adaptation, are pushed out of the realm of innocent and dumb teenage after school special flirtation and into that of unbearable melodrama.
Bella’s love belongs to the vampire Edward Cullen who is played by Robert Pattison and looks like the son if Bela Lugosi, is eternally posed in some dark tableau of deep suffering and whose hair seems to have its own center of gravity. Fearing that such a mortal is not safe amidst his family of bloodsuckers, he ditches Bella and disappears in hopes of protecting her.

Of course the split hits hard; so hard in fact that Bella’s suffering surpasses that of general high school moping and instead keeps her up at night screaming out in such pain that you’d think she was in the throws of a heroin intervention program. I guess that’s why it is unwise to give all of your love to the only boy in class who would rather bite your neck than caress it.

What Bella discovers though is that, whenever placed in any sort of mortal danger, visions of Edward appear, who warns her against her actions. Bella thus becomes an adrenaline junky and in one scene narrowly escapes disaster when she crashes a dirt bike at top speed after being distracted by Edward. Although still a teenager, she should know that there is no greater danger while operating a dirt bike than the appearance of apparitions taking the outward appearance of former immortal lovers.

In an effort to cope with her pain, Bella begins becoming close with her neighbour Jacob (the invariably shirtless Taylor Lautner), who is both Native American and, she soon discovers after he too abandons her without explanation, is slowly turning into a werewolf as he ages. As if puberty isn’t hard enough. The werewolves of course are part of his tribe and have a pact with the vampires, their enemies, which agree that they will leave each other alone, so long as the vampires stay on their own land and don’t run around biting humans.

This proves to be a problem as Bella’s feelings are caught between both Edward and Jacob and so forth. There is also a rather fruitless subplot about Edward travelling to Rome to kill himself in front of a vampire committee of some sort named the Vultrians after he believes Bella has died during one of her adrenaline rushes. The Vulturians are lead by Aro who is played by the British actor Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) who got to play a werewolf in the uninspired Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and goes just over the top enough here, his body twisting and contorting in on itself, to prove him a man in serious need of a leading role in an Anne Rice adaptation.

The film this time was directed by Chris Weitz, who directed two invaluable comedies (American Pie and About a Boy) with his brother Paul before heading out on his own with the truly underrated the Golden Compass. Weitz, a more honest storyteller to Catherine Hadrwick’s more stylistic tendencies, trades in the ugly blue murk that covered the first Twilight film and replaces it with a brighter, more natural autumn look. And that’s about the only difference; Weitz, a good filmmaker is awash in a sea of juvenile, ridiculous and, more often than not, just plain dumb material.

What’s most shocking is how very little actually happens in the film, which feels like a constant build up to some big event that never quite gets around to happening, as if we are only getting the introduction to the next film. But the first film did that too. Bella loses Edward, gains and loses Jacob, is attacked by bad vampires, is saved by good wolves, is reunited with Edward, is taken in front of the Vulturian and so on and so forth. But there is no overriding dramatic ark that makes the story feel like a self-sufficient whole.

The entire crux of the film is then placed on this silly, uninspired, two-thirds immortal high school love triangle. You’d like to think that, at the close of 2009, the least one could expect from a special-effects fueled blockbuster is some meaningful action that its characters are engaged in and that propels the story into some sort of complete narrative. At the end of the day all of the scenes with the vampires and the werewolves and the Vulturians are simply a collection of surplus episodes that all lead up to the slender but dire question of whether or not Bella and Edward will end up together again.

Of course it would be hard to blame Weitz or any of the cast and crew involved in the Twilight adaptations because all problems seem to originate directly between the pages of Stephanie Meyer’s books from which they are based. The books, although aimed at a preteen market, are written at about a nearly incompetent third grade level and would seem to have no concept of the politics of drama, plot or story structure. It doesn’t help that the screenplays are written by Mellisa Rosenberg at the same level of incompetence. Take this exchange, directed at Bella from a fiancé of one of the werewolves:

“So you’re the vampire girl?”
“Yeah. So you’re the wolf girl?”
“Yeah. Well, at least I’m engaged to one.”

What? She’s engaged to a wolf girl? How could such horrible, stupid dialogue pass by into the finished cut of the film unnoticed? At the end of the day, Twilight needs to be put into complete artistic turnaround. It needs a director and writer who are willing to break it down, move it as far away from the original texts as possible and rebuilt it back from the ground up. Fat chance of that happening.