In the late 1990s, I was obsessed with a WB television show called Roswell. It was a lot like the Twilight Saga, except instead of sparkly vampires there was a family of aliens taking over the life and heart of a moody teenage girl.
Stay with me. This train of thought does have a caboose.
The show was brilliant but underappreciated in its first season of full-on teen melodrama. So the network decided to up the sci-fi action factor in a bid to engage a larger male viewing audience…or at least keep the guys entertained while their girlfriends swooned over a parade of gorgeous male leads and across-the-universe love stories. The results were mixed, at best, and the show sometimes seemed to forget that its main characters were still just teenagers or else took on a “creature of the week” vibe. A similar choice and similarly mixed results take shape with Twilight: Eclipse.
If you’ve been living anywhere but under a rock for the past three years, you know that Twilight: Eclipse is the highly anticipated third installment of The Twilight Saga, based on Stephenie Meyers’ wildly popular teen vampire-romance novels. You also know that, despite its billion-dollar combined box office take, the series gets its fair share of teasing from both audiences and critics.
Blame it on the toothless vampires. Chalk it up to the parade of shirtless Native American boys who turn into werewolves. Or pin the tail on the relatively low talk to action (sexual or otherwise) ratio. Rest assured, though, that the folks at Team Twilight have heard it all loud and clear and are hoping Eclipse changes minds.
How else do you explain the markedly more violent tone of this latest film? In its opening scenes, it cuts from a Robert Frost poetry-reading Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) cuddling chastely in a field of wildflowers with her diamond-studded undead mate Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) to the Gotham-dark streets of Seattle where another teenager is not so lucky. This young man, Riley Biers, gets attacked and “turned” by an angry red-haired bloodsucker (Bryce Dallas Howard).
Throughout the film, it continues to cut back and forth between Bella’s relatively idyllic (despite what she seems to think) life as a high school senior in the small town of Forks, Washington and the bloody violence of an army of teenage and child vampires being created to make sure she never makes it to college. Thanks to the human blood still living in their tissue, “newborns,” as they are called, are more vicious, bloodthirsty, and stronger than your run-of-the-mill vampire.
To make matters worse, a trio of merciless vampire police known as the Volturi, led by a vamp with a sadistic telepathic ability (Dakota Fanning), have been drawn to town by the mayhem. This is very bad news since they’re not Bella’s biggest fans. They want the girl turned or dead haste-post-haste.
As always, though, Bella is clueless about the danger. She’s being protected by the two hotties that make up her supernatural love triangle. On one side is the amber-eyed, 109-year-old vamp who resists her increasingly urgent pleas to take her humanity and her virginity, insisting that both can wait until after he’s put a ring on her finger. On the other is a buff, bare-chested werewolf boy named Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), who knows in whose arms she really belongs. It’s all building to a face off against the newborns, in which Edward and his clan must form an uneasy alliance with the werewolves to keep Bella safe.
If there really is a Roswell-like conspiracy to get Twilight to appeal to more carriers of the Y chromosome, David Slade was an excellent choice to take over as the franchise’s newest director (its third for those keeping count). Having helmed the ultra-dark and ultra-bloody 30 Days of Night, he certainly knows what kind of vampire film boys like: ones with shaky, handheld camera work.
Eclipse features some exciting bloody rampages to create the newborns, an interestingly-shot period back story for one member of the Cullen clan, and a well choreographed and edited final battle where heads and arms are ripped off by the dozen. I was a little perplexed about why the vampires crystallized before they died but that confusion was overshadowed by my gratitude for the improved werewolf transformations (not so bad in New Moon) and vampire high-speed chases (simply terrible in the original Twilight).
While Slade hardly abandons the story’s romance–there are plenty of close-ups of Bella’s porcelain skin and enough steamy kisses to fill a daytime soap–he does gloss over the teen part pretty quickly. Bella’s non-supernatural friends exist in the novels to remind her that there is life outside of Edward. But, like Bella, Slade has already made up his mind that theirs is not a very interesting one. The two scenes with Bella’s human friends (including Academy award nominee Anna Kendrick, who has always been the story’s bitchy voice of reason) seem to belong to an entirely different film.
Once again, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg actually improves upon Meyer’s halting, ponderous storytelling, this time by infusing the film with a self-aware sense of humor. At one point, Edward jealously asks Bella if Jacob even owns a shirt. Teen girls everywhere are no doubt hoping the answer is no.
Perhaps the folks at Team Twilight could stop giving Lautner clothes altogether and spend the budget surplus on better wigs for all of the female characters. Stewart, whose hair is still growing back from her pixie cut in The Runaways, had an especially awful pile affixed to her head. I’m sure the distraction of it explains her retreat into the expressionless, passionless acting I thought she left behind after playing Joan Jett.
Snark aside, the Twilight film series, like my beloved Roswell, is a mixed bag. It does actually get better with each installment and with its continued love story and its increased action, Twlight: Eclipse is a pretty watchable piece of entertainment. There’s no doubt that an even larger army of TwiHards will return for parts four and five.
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