Director: David Slade
Screenwriter: Melissa Rosenberg
Director of photography: Javier Aguirresarobe
Production designer: Paul Denham Austerberry
Visual effects supervisors: Nicholas Brooks, Kevin Tod Haug
Costume designer: Tish Monaghan
Music: Howard Shore
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Bryce Dallas Howard, Billy Burke, Dakota Fanning.
(124 min.13V)
The Bottom Line.
This film-series changes its director with each new movie, and this time we have a relative newcomer, David Slade, who has made two excellent, edgy, independent thrillers. “Hard Candy” and “30 Days of Night” created a taut, frightening vibe and that has been carried into this film. Slade obviously knows that he is working with a carefully contrived and over-heated melodrama, but he gives the film a great look, with action scenes that are big, noisy and scary, just what you want to see in a horror movie. It’s those doleful, torpid encounters with the three central characters, who are locked in a jagged triangle of sexual longing and rejection that make you feel as if you life will end before the film does.
Main Review
It’s almost impossible to review “Twilight: Eclipse”, because it is cocooned in a kind of international fan-frenzy. Anybody who dares to suggest that Stephenie Meyer’s four novels are gushy adolescent romances or the pulpiest kind, must face the wrath of the “Twi-Heads”, as her fans are known. The truth is that in a post-feminist age, her cliché-ridden books were published because she found “an angle”, an occult twist which loaded the romance with the trappings of a horror movie.
Just think about it. The core of this romantic drama is that Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) who is a bright, sensitive and intelligent woman has to make a radical choice. She is deeply attracted to two men. There’s Edward (Robert Pattinson), a brooding, tortured soul, part Heathcliff from “Wuthering Heights”, and part Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice”. He has fallen in love with Bella and wants to marry her but there is a catch.
Edward is a vampire and much as he loves Bella, the only way they can truly be together, is that he will have to kill her by draining her blood and resurrecting her to eternal life as his vampire wife. In a modern feminist world, where all kinds of relationships adjustments are successfully being made, literally dying for the guy seems a little excessive for a modern woman, and what do you do when, after you have been dead for a century, you can’t stand the sight of each other anymore.
To me, it is like stripping away all individuality and sense of character to be exactly what he wants you to be – forever. The facts that girls are swooning about this possibility tells me that feminism has a whole new battle to win.
Bella’s other suitor, Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who is of American-Indian descent, is a more extroverted, physical and direct guy and he too adores Bella and also wants to marry her. His wooing technique, sadly, seems to exist mainly of taking off his shirt and exposing what is, undoubtedly, an exceptional physique that is quite impervious to cold. But are perfect abs and pecs enough to sustain a marriage? Jacob, of course, is a werewolf, and while he does not have to kill Bella to make her one of his kind, life with Jacob in a rural clan in which her extended family can turn into ravening wolves in the blink of a reddish eye, redefines the concept of living with “difficult in-laws”. It’s a bit disappointing that, with three films behind us, not much has changed. At the end of this film Bella seems to have made a commitment to Edward, leaving poor Jacob to lick his wounds -- and perhaps plot revenge?
These books and films clearly speak volumes to a flushed, gushing international audience of women of all ages, all holding their breath for that final, inevitable embrace, which is still two whole movies away. You have to applaud Hollywood for scenting profit in these pulpy novels, because nobody else did, and to give them their due. Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner, probably have big careers ahead of them.
These three movies have become one of the most profitable movie franchises of recent years, topped only by the “Harry Potter” saga. The cleverness of the “Twilight”-concept is that it has kept the soppy love story simpering on, with colourful new characters, most of them nasty; and with stunning settings, with beautiful atmospheric skies and gorgeous forest landscapes, in which gorgeous cast are as wooden as the forest is.
The first film had the virtue of novelty and pace, to say nothing of a good-looking cast, who performed competently in a wonderfully atmospheric setting. The second film was a bit more slushy and indulgent, but audiences were also diverted by dissolute Italian vampires who were elegantly decadent and wicked, and they made the film fly by. But in this movie we know all about everyone’s secrets, and we can virtually walk blindfold through the gorgeous forest landscapes because we’ve dawdled through them so often.
The real problem is the two-hour running time, which could have slashed by at least 35 minutes without losing coherence or style. That would add impact to new sub-plot involving Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) a mean, red-haired vampire bitch who has been down in the cities, where she was chomping away at the throats of good-looking youngsters and turning them into an army of newborn vampires. She’s leading them on a march into the forests where she plans to destroy the Edward Cullen and his family.
As the family gear up for this crucial battle, they form an alliance with the forest werewolves who will help them to destroy the newborn vampires. This part of the film is interesting and exciting. The special effects, particularly those involving the werewolves, are superb and the film is beautifully shot. But the pace is awkward. The film starts with an electrifying killing and then we get to Bella and Edward mooning in a field of flowers, and the film loses pace.
Then there’s a cleverly handled account of how these tribal werewolves came to own their land, that picks up speed but it stalls again when Bella has another anguished “What shall I do?” session, this time with Jacob. We run a stop-start, jerky route through good action scenes, but fidget through the dragged-out romantic angst of Bella being torn between two lovers. It makes for a choppy film experience and while the technical excellence and great visuals carry it through, it’s a long and, sadly, a far-too familiar haul. Now we wait for the final installment “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” but just to underscore my point about undue length, they are drag out that final episode into two full movies, and if you think this film is a sedative, the next two are likely to put you in a coma.