I Saw The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1

(I’m going to get into Twilight spoilers here, so be forewarned. And I have to add that if you’ve somehow managed to not read the books but still want to have a spoiler-free Twilight reading experience at some pont in the future, you should probably leave the internet for a week or two.)

I’ve watched every Twilight movie because I’ve been waiting like a deranged rubbernecker for the filmmakers to get to the fourth book. Whereas the first three books in the series are badly written teenage romances about a mortal girl falling in love with a beautiful immortal vampire boy, Breaking Dawn is a (still badly written) tribute to the fears and anxieties of teenage girls about the life they’re about to inherit. The book opens with a strangely joyless wedding scene, clumsily limps into a neurotic honeymoon sequence, and then plummets directly into a sickening pregnancy and birth fantasia that plays to every fear about childbirth that a teenage girl has ever entertained: It’s gory, violent, vicious, and explicit. Then, the unwanted third spoke of the love triangle—a werewolf named Jacob—falls in love with the infant born out of that nauseating birth scene, as Bella, the main character, becomes a vampire. Scratch that—she becomes the Most Important Vampire Ever, with the exception of her new daughter, who she has already fobbed off into an arranged marriage with her ex-potential lover.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1—for reasons of profit, they’ve split the last Twilight book into two movies, even though every major plot point from the book appears in this film—is about as direct a translation of the first two thirds of the book as is possible. It’s as poorly acted and directed as the books are poorly written. Everything looks flimsy and cheap (with the exception of what I assume are digitalized special effects to make Kristen Stewart’s Bella look ill during her pregnancy; she becomes as pale and as wan as a cancer patient toward the end of the movie, and it’s hard to look at her during those scenes). The film is directed with all the ingenuity of a soap opera, and Robert Pattinson and Stewart, who appeared to at least be trying to act in the first two movies, stumble through their lines with a startling lack of passion or skill.

The first two thirds of the film are positively boring. I kept expecting The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 to end on a half-hearted cliffhanger, but then all the queasy plot points of the fourth book are ticked off, in almost rote fashion: Bella swells, learns to drink blood, and her spine cracks in a surprisingly brutal scene. She’s eaten alive, from inside and out, and her corpse lays out on a slab, with the gallons of blood that poured out of her mangled bottom half drying all around her crotch like some demonic halo. (It’s enough to scare an entire generation of women into going childless.) Then, Jacob falls in love with an infant. Those scenes are tense and creepy almost in spite of the acting and direction; the badness of the filmmaking adds to the horror of the sequences. When all is said and done, all that’s left for the sequel is a limp showdown with the big bad vampire Pope of the Volturi, which basically ends with a raging anticlimax. (The Volturi are only in the film for a couple of seconds; they’re forgotten in the midst of all the biological squick.)

Hopefully, this paucity of material remaining means the filmmakers (this outing and the next, not that it matters, were directed by Bill Condon, with all the lack of imagination he brought to Kinsey) will stray from the books for a change during the fifth and final Twilight movie. The only time the series ever shines are those few moments when the books are forgotten and the characters are allowed to react to the circumstances the way ordinary humans would. The one part of this movie that felt at all human and not at all contrived was when the characters took a moment to mock a ridiculous plot point that the book treats with the exact same insensate earnestness it treats all the other plot points. For one moment, they’re in on the joke with us, and a tiny flash of ingenuity sparks through, only to be swallowed up in the mire of the texts again.