The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
The Twilight phenomenon is more about psychology and sociology that cinema, because none of these movies have been any good. Eclipse, the third in the sage, features the same old stuff--Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), loved by two hunky guys, one a vampire and one a werewolf. I suppose a teenage girl would love to imagine two guys fighting over her like they do here, but it's a shame this fantasy can't be packaged better.
Eclipse is badly written, acted and directed. The director is David Slade, who made Hard Candy, a movie I loathed. He follows the style already established in the first two films, which seems to be designed to emphasize a kind of brooding romance, and remove any suspense. The dialogue is insipid; the actors all look like they are posing for fashion shoots. Robert Pattinson, as Stewart's vampire love, is wooden, and Taylor Lautner, as Jacob the werewolf, acts with his abs (the one good line in the film is when Pattinson asks, "Doesn't he own a shirt?"). I still haven't made up my mind about whether Stewart can actually act. She's played too many sullen girls for me to judge if that's the only way she can play a role, and she hasn't had anything to do in these films except bite her lower lip and look concerned.
The plot, such as it is, concerns one of the rogue vampires from the first film, a redhead now played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who has created an army of "newborns" in Seattle to get revenge on the Cullens, Pattinson's family of good vampires. For some reason that escapes me, Howard has sent her protege to use Stewart to get at the Cullens, which means that Lautner and his clan of Indians/werewolves grudgingly team with the vampires to protect Stewart. The big fight at the end is ludicrously staged, and it seems vampires can be killed just like any person, though when their heads are chopped off they don't bleed, they look more like decapitated garden statuary.
The movie is less about vampires and werewolves than it is about a love triangle. Stewart loves both of her pursuers, but it's Edward she wants. He wants to marry her, because he's "old school," and she reassures her father that she's still a virgin. She wants him to turn her into a vampire, so she won't grow older than him, but everyone tells her this is a bad idea. It's easy to take the fact that the book's creator, Stephenie Meyer, is a Mormon, and ascribe the notion of old-fashioned Christian values at work in this fable, with its emphasis on abstinence and Bella's "conversion" a stand-in for religious conversion, but I think that's giving the movie too much credit. Instead it just feeds into stereotypes about girls who fantasize about their own weddings. I also found the treatment of the Indians as patronizing--they live on a reservation, surrounded by pickup trucks, and sit around campfires telling stories about the old days. I would hope that modern Indians would like to see themselves as more complex than this.
I haven't read the books, but I'm guessing the films are very faithful, as stuff is included that just doesn't add to the story. Stewart's normal high school friends make token appearances, with Anna Kendrick giving a graduation speech. I was interested to see that a couple of the Cullens, who have been window dressing up until now, were given backstories, but this is the kind of thing that True Blood does much better. Dakota Fanning, the best actor involved in this mess, has a brief role as a spooky chick wearing red contact lenses.
I will watch the last two installments of this saga when they come out on DVD, just to keep up with pop culture, but I'm not looking forward to them. I'm sure there's much better books out there that would inspire teenagers to go to the movies. The Hunger Games is one, so I hope that's a big hit.
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