Vampire Ever After: BREAKING DAWN - PART 2

You can learn a lot of things watching Breaking Dawn Part 2, the fifth and final Twilight movie. For starters, you can learn that decapitating a vampire looks much like decapitating a Lego person. You can also learn that vampires have so many different variants that when they group together they look like undead X-Men.  Most importantly, you can learn that some of the earlier Twilight movies weren’t so bad after all. On a meta level this is the story of a franchise that fell in love with itself, growing ever more thin in plot, ludicrous in tone, confused in implications, and yet approaching each new scene with a sense of suffocating reverence to the Stephenie Meyer-penned source material. What seemed to be cheesy or earnest in Catherine Hardwicke’s original installment or heavy-handed romanticism in Chris Weitz’s first sequel seems in retrospect to be appealingly situated, allowing genuine humor and creepiness to sneak in ever so slightly around the edges of what could easily have become ponderously bonkers. Because, oh boy, Breaking Dawn Part 2 is nothing if not ponderously bonkers.

Having resolved most of the tension involved in the Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) supernatural love triangle way back in the third film and then spending a fourth film limping its way through a dull wedding on its way to some surprising last-minute body horror, there’s nowhere else to go but to bring back the biggest delight of the franchise. They are the Volturi, a scheming group of vampiric overlords based in Venice. Only glimpsed here and there since their introduction in the second movie, they police the hush-hush world of bloodsuckers, maintaining this secret for thousands of years. It’s a fun pulpy concept deliciously devoured by former child-star Dakota Fanning and Michael Sheen with long black hair and glowing red eyes set so agreeably in his pasty pale skin. This time around he gets a fun moment where he lets out a startled laugh that goes up and down and trills around. Anyways, you may recall that in the last film Bella, while still human, was impregnated by Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), vampire. That child poses a threat to vampire kind for one reason or another so there’s the last gasp of conflict.

But the thing is, to describe the film to someone unfamiliar with the material would sound like utter hallucinatory madness. It’s a film with a family of vampires who stand around like they’re posing for a Lands’ End catalog, a creepy CGI psychic baby and her werewolf soulmate, and superpowered multicultural vampire covens that feel borrowed from somewhere else. And yet the film doesn’t even try to live up to its full nutty potential despite director Bill Condon’s attempts to inject some style on occasion. No, each and every moment has to quake with stultifying self-importance. Even the levity feels like forced fan service. Why else include a gratuitous – and coyly edited – scene in which the heartthrob werewolf (Taylor Lautner) suddenly disrobes before changing into his wolf form?

This final installment spends the bulk of its runtime introducing new characters and engineering strange one-last-scene curtain calls for just a couple of series regulars in between rote, sullen recitations of franchise lore. And yet no one found room for supporting character MVP Anna Kendrick, as one of the only human characters left, to stop by and bring a few laughs? By the time the Volturi float in and bring with them a scene of true energized conflict by way of a standoff that explodes into surprisingly satisfying violent, twisty digital combat before a fine rug-pull moment, it’s like finding a cheap prize at the bottom of a box of stale caramelized popcorn.

The longer the series goes on, the more it grows difficult to ignore the ways in which the story runs from its truly interesting aspects. Just look at how the half-vamp child is handled here as nothing more than cutesy, the total opposite of the concept’s inherent eeriness. I’m not asking for Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire level pathos here, simply acknowledgement of the idea’s complexity. The overarching idea of a hundred-year-old vampire falling in love with a teenage girl (and vice versa) has plenty of taboo frissons, a creepiness mingling with forbidden romance. To wish to become a vampire in order to be with him forever is a puppy love desire that dooms forever, limiting the poor girl’s future options, to say the least. The relationship has the potential to literally poison her. That’s why, upon reflection, the first film works fairly well. It marries vampire horror and adolescent angst quite nicely. That film’s final scene, in which Bella almost, but not quite, gets fanged at prom is a fun recognition of the situation’s implications, desire painfully denied for the benefit of all involved.

But now, in its final 115 minutes, the franchise engineers a resolution that works through magical thinking, resolving supernatural conundrums because True Love or something. After two mild entertainments and two films of increasingly slow, dumb storytelling, this finale’s best feat is activating a mild affection in me for the franchise’s earliest days, before it was for True Believers only. I don’t begrudge fans their enjoyment of the series; I just wish that, after a certain point, the filmmakers will still interested in letting me in instead of assuming that I already was.

A Sleepy Kind of Love: ECLIPSE

By far the lousiest of the Twilight movies, a series that has thus far managed to be only watchable at best, Eclipse is a film only the most passionate fans, those who already know they’ll just looove it, could enjoy. It contains the worst acting, the worst set design, and some of the worst effects. Or maybe it was made worse by the movie’s slow pace and endlessly circular dialogue that allowed me to stew in my discontent. It all seems thin and chintzy, as if any old thing could have been slapped together to please the fans as long as it contained all the moping and doe-eyed expressions they could get. A handful of scenes late in the film take place on the top of a mountain that looks so unconvincing that I got the feeling that a slight shift of the camera would reveal a stagehand shoveling fake snow. Even the gorgeous deep autumnal color palate of the second film has been replaced with thin grey tones, a warning of depressing blandness to come.

The other Twilight movies were no great cinema, but at least Catherine Hardwicke and Chris Weitz, who directed one installment each, had a good handle on what worked best about their films, and it sure wasn’t the source material or the horribly uncomplicated love triangle at its center. They played up the supporting cast, where the series’ best talent is kept, giving juicy scene-stealing moments to a great actor like Michael Sheen or allowing supremely talented young actresses like Anna Kendrick and Dakota Fanning to bring some class to so much hogwash. Even poor Billy Burke, in the thankless role of a clueless father, was utilized for his ability to show with a glance how he can seemingly sense the ridiculousness. Here the supporting cast is nothing but glorified extras.

Eclipse is all about Bella and Edward and Jacob and how Bella loves Edward but has feelings for Jacob too. This is also the same basic plot as the second film, but this time it’s played with considerably less energy. The returning leads – Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner – almost appear to be sleepwalking through their scenes. Stewart and Pattinson, especially, seem to have none of what little chemistry they had in the first film while Lautner has lost any spark of romance he had in the second.

Of course, they aren’t helped by the fact that most of the dialogue in the movie, when it’s not simply dull exposition, is nearly sub-literate statements of emotions and desire. “I want you.” “I have feelings for him.” “You love me.” “This is dangerous.” “You know I’m hotter than you.” All of the above are actual lines of dialogue that can be heard at different points in the film, but the last of those at least has the decency to be something of a laugh line. This is a film that cuts out all but the sappiest and dullest of moments, stripping away all the little moments of real humanity or small humor that caused its predecessors to have some modicum of life.

To his credit, director David Slade (of Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night) shoots the dialogue scenes close and quick, trying, but failing, to spark some life into the movie. After some time, the extreme close-ups of pale faces started to run together. Slade is at his best in three flashbacks that are the sole sources of excitement to be found. They’re chances to break out of the dull colors and duller conversations. My favorite of the three presents brief snippets of a story about a bride-to-be who is beaten and left for dead at the hands of her fiancé. Saved from certain death by being turned into a vampire, she takes her revenge. There’s a great shot of this vampiric woman, all dressed up in a wedding gown, bursting in on her abusive ex. That’s the kind of dynamism I would have loved to see in the rest of the movie.

Instead, our simple characters are still dithering over who loves whom, and how much, in endlessly tiresome fashion. Not even a big, dumb vampires-and-werewolves-versus-evil-vampires brawl at the end could rouse me from the stupor that I entered after looking at the time, certain that the movie was almost over, and discovering that there was still an hour to go.

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal! It's NEW MOON!

There’s a moment late in New Moon, the second movie in the wildly popular Twilight series, when Bella Swan, our protagonist-of-sorts, is confronted by an evil vampire who attempts to read her mind to see if she has a special power that makes her invulnerable to vampire E.S.P. He gives it a go and then pulls away from her, clearly disappointed. “I sense nothing,” he says. I thought: that’s about right. I wouldn’t be so quick to decide you can’t read her mind if I were you, Mr. Vampire.

Bella’s a weak character precisely because she appears to be a very unthinking person. This goes beyond just simple teenage feelings of invulnerability or hubris. She simply hasn’t a thought in her head. She’s a weak person who falls easily under the spell of strong, dangerous males and is quick to mistake simple lust for everlasting love. This, or rather the glorification of this, can be seen as incredibly irresponsible, especially in light of the masses of tween and teen girls that adore the series, since girls like Bella in the real world can, and sometimes do, fall into abusive relationships. A real abusive boyfriend is much more terrifying than any supernatural force.

It’s this squirmy undercurrent to the plot that is most responsible for sinking Catherine Hardwicke’s 2008 adaptation of Twilight. Though, to be fair, Stephenie Meyer’s horrible writing doesn’t inspire great filmmaking all on its own. Even so, that’s no excuse for Hardwicke’s strange choices in hokey special effects and inflated reverence, not to mention her apparent inability to direct actors or sustain a tone. I would be surprised if she had cut anything from the film for being too cheesy. The movie’s a bit of a drag as it spends vast portions of the movie introducing us to Bella, a wholly uninteresting protagonist, and Edward, a vampire whose primary characteristic is his ability to look handsome. There’s not a lot going on here and, although Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have some degree of talent, there’s not a lot to the characters to get an uninitiated audience excited. The movie asks you to buy a deep love between the two that just doesn’t seem to be there. She pushes her hair back. He says he needs to control himself so he doesn’t bite her. She wants to be a vampire so she can be with him forever. He says no. Repeat. There’s just not enough meaningful conflict happening here.

To my surprise, director Chris Weitz, taking the reins of the franchise for New Moon, seems to recognize the fundamental lack of energy in the plot handed down by Meyer. He’s still fairly reverential to the source material, bringing along all its problems. Despite expanding the plot to include a pack of werewolves to counterbalance the vampires, with whom they have a nasty, centuries-old feud, the events and ideas presented simply don’t live up to their potential. Instead, we find that Jacob, a nice Native American kid with a small role in the first film, is falling in love with Bella. Taylor Lautner plays Jacob, and he’s more than capable of filling a third corner in a developing love triangle. He’s so good, actually, you wonder why Bella would want to stay with the icy, controlling, emotionally abusive vampire when she could have a warm, caring, doting werewolf? After all, Edward jets off in the first reel and doesn’t show up again until the climax. (Does this make me a member of Team Jacob? I’m not clear on the specifics of these things).

Weitz manages to bring this conflict to a bit of a sizzle through sheer filmmaking alone. He almost overcomes the weak material by bringing in Javier Aguirresarobe, of such films as Talk to Her and The Others, as cinematographer, and the great Alexandre Desplat as composer. These two gentlemen are at the height of their powers here. By not condescending to the material and instead doing some of their best work, they help the movie not feel so cheap. The movie looks and sounds rich and sumptuous; the colors are deep and warm, the string section soars. This isn’t the dishwater palate of the first film. Here is a movie that looks romantic and lush, even if the plot isn’t always as convincing in that aspect. And even though we get plenty of slow-motion moments featuring a character moving closer to the camera, all the better for the 12-year-old girls to swoon, it’s not a technique that’s gets overused. I was reminded of the short pauses for laughter that can be spotted in Marx Brothers’ movies.

The plot’s still mostly a drag with effectively nothing happening for most of the second act, but at least we have fun supporting actors like Anna Kendrick and Billy Burke to liven things up. Weitz and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg have tried their hardest to keep things moving with a chase here, a stalking there, a near-death experience here, a funny interlude there. Mostly, though, it’s just our characters sitting around talking about immortal rules and mortal emotions. It’s amazing so much time can be spent on characterization and yet we still end up with pretty flat characters. And yet, Chris Weitz’s New Moon does something that Meyer couldn’t do, no matter how many pounds of terrible prose she expends. This movie occasionally generates a sense of rushing teenage emotion, strong and nonsensical, the headlong crash of a crush and the first sparks of attraction. Maybe later on in the franchise (I stopped reading after the second book) we’ll have to accept that True Love has developed. For now, this is almost good enough.

The movie really picks up speed with an ending that is actually kind of fun. We go to meet some of the Volturi, a clan of vampires that, in these movies’ mythology, rule all the vampires in the world. Played by grade-A actors like Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning, they, for lack of a better term, vamp it up wonderfully. They’re at once funny and menacing, no small feat. I enjoyed their contributions so much, with their dry line readings, billowing black cloaks, and piercing red eyes, that they very nearly pushed the movie into solid recommendation territory. But they aren’t in the movie for long enough. Their screen time is probably only 15 to 20 minutes (if that) of this over-two-hours production.

There are plenty of people who care very deeply about these Twilight books and movies. On the one hand, I’m glad they’re excited about something. On the other hand, I’m disappointed so many seem to be missing the uncomfortable, fairly silly, and potentially dangerous, undercurrents of the story. And yet, I have to admit I was kind of captured by this movie at times, enjoying supporting performances and adoring the style and score. I would never say that it’s a good movie, but I would say it’s a watchable, even at times enjoyable, movie. Unless you have already completely lost yourself in fandom for the series, the less seriously you take it (you hear that, vampire geeks and werewolf nerds?*) the more fun you will have.

*I say this lovingly.