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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One gives surprisingly good swoon
Breaking Dawn, Part One: Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill
Seven rating: * * * * * * *
Meanwhile, we hear the patter of contentious tiny feet. Breaking Dawn: Part 1, the first half of the saga’s grand finale, comprises a 21st-century update of Roe vs. Wade, with Teams Jacob and Edward taking sides round Bella Swan’s baby bump after her vampire beau impregnates her on honeymoon.
Director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) lends this instalment an intimacy rare in blockbusters, before a final-reel shift into gynaecological horror. If such moments suggest the franchise remains petrified of sex, elsewhere it still gives surprisingly good swoon.
an up-to-now-entertaining set of films about a love triangle between a vampire with a quiff, a dour-faced schoolgirl and a werewolf who can’t act, has always attracted an unreasonable amount of bile. Unusually, it hasn't come from critics, so much as the droves of young, straight males with a broadband connection who resent that a popular movie series has the gall to pander to an audience other than them.
Crowds largely made up of teenage girls and their approving mothers have so far spent £1.13 billion watching Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) brood and mumble their way through three increasingly well-made films that authentically captured the misery of being a love-struck teenager.
But this fourth and penultimate film, in which Edward and Bella marry and finally consummate their relationship, takes an Olympic-pole-vault-sized leap backwards. Director Bill Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg have adapted Stephenie Meyer’s awkward source novel into a formless, gormless soap opera: it’s a humourless, incoherent bore that lives down to the very worst stereotypes associated with the franchise.
After a brief prologue in which the cast receive their wedding invitations and Jacob gets so angry he takes his t-shirt off – don’t question it, it’s what he does – the film opens with Edward and Bella’s long-awaited nuptials. These are admittedly well-mounted and the bride’s Pippa Middleton dress is very on-trend. They also give the unsung heroes of the Twilight cast, Billy Burke as Bella’s father Charlie and Anna Kendrick as her friend Jessica, their once-per-film chance to show off: in this case, in an enjoyable after-dinner speech montage that recalls a scene from this summer’s sleeper hit comedy Bridesmaids. The happy couple then jet off on their Brazilian honeymoon, during which the groom’s enthusiastic lovemaking demolishes their four-poster bed – well, after 200-odd years of abstinence, it would do.
At this point, Bella falls pregnant and finds her human womb struggles to cope with a foetus that’s 50 percent vampire. She tells her father that she’s fallen ill and is checking into a Swiss clinic – which must have put his mind at rest – before she returns in secret to the Cullen house, where Edward’s family do their best to make sure she survives to full-term, making her drink human blood in an attempt to feed the baby (Edward thoughtfully decants it into a fast food cup first). Meanwhile, the local werewolves swear revenge on the Cullens, firstly because Bella’s life has been threatened, and also because they take a dim view of human-vampire procreation generally.
As the above paragraph shows, it’s almost impossible to make the plot of Breaking Dawn sound sensible, but it would have been nice if the film made a token effort to do so. Instead, Rosenberg’s screenplay foregrounds the book’s loopiest ideas while burying anything that might have made for compelling drama: Edward’s anxiety over fathering a child that’s killing his wife and Jacob’s strained loyalty to his revenge-hungry pedigree chums, for example, go almost completely unexplored. The script is often startlingly lazy: in one confused scene, Edward explains the nuances of werewolf behaviour to no-one in particular, just to give the audience a fighting chance at comprehension. Earlier, Bella croakily reveals that she wants to mix her and Edward's mothers’ names together and call their baby Renesmee. The line is presented without a flicker of irony and was deservedly greeted in the critics' screening with gales of scornockery.
The special effects sequences are equally bad. Unlike the superb werewolf-on-vampire battles in Eclipse, the David Slade-directed third installment, Breaking Dawn’s action scenes are muddled and gloomy. They’re also not particularly easy to take seriously thanks to the wolves speaking with bizarre half-human, half-canine voices that put me in mind of Scooby Doo.
Sadly, it’s unlikely that Breaking Dawn – Part 2 will be any better than this (both films were shot back-to-back by the same director), but an incongruous mid-credits teaser, featuring Michael Sheen as the camp vampire king Aro, hints that it might at least have a sense of humour. We can but hope. At least that way, some of the laughs might be intentional.
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Martini Peres
Martini Peres has torture tested cell phones and smartphones for industry leaders like CNET and InformationWeek. He remembers when 4G was just a screen on PowerPoint presentations and is fascinated with the amount of innovation out there. Marin has spent a lot of time with BlackBerry and Android b...
