The Twilight Saga is a phenomenon that holds some fascination for me. I don’t quite know how it started… hearing some friends talk about their experience with the books, I guess, but it ended with me reading all four novels. Painful, but necessary, and now I know for sure just how good or bad the books are. Oh, and I also watched the movies, all three of them, including the latest one: Eclipse. If you want to know what I think of the novels, I suggest you take a look at my blog, where I’m currently in the process of writing an eight-part review of the entire series. If you want to know what I thought of Eclipse… well, just read on.
I’ve seen both Twilight and New Moon and my conclusion in both cases was that although they aren’t good movies by any measure they’re at least competently made. The sets look good, there are some truly amazing landscape shots, and even though I resent the hype around Robert Pattinson, his morose-looking counterpart Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner’s abs, I still have to admit that there’s some decent acting to be found among all the sparkle and shine. Now, if only the story was less asinine…
Unfortunately the same doesn’t go for Eclipse. As I sat down in the cinema the other day I was actually looking forward to the movie. The first two were, after all, enjoyable if you didn’t allow your brain to get in the way and David Slade had previously directed Hard Candy, which I really liked (and then there was 30 Days of Night… well, I’d been trying to overlook that).
The auditorium dims, the curtain rolls back, the hum of the projector fills the tiny cinema in which I’m sitting and I get lost. Unfortunately I don’t get lost in superb acting and poetic imagery – it’s the plot that loses me. After twenty minutes I feel very happy indeed that I have recently re-read the novel in preparation for writing a review of the darn thing. It’s like… well, it’s hard to describe, but I’d say the closest thing would be to write the individual parts of Eclipse down on domino tiles, then to throw said tiles into an opaque bag and draw them out at random (but not all of them!). Incoherent is too kind a word.
Part of the problem stems from the book itself, which suffers from an embarrassing lack of plot. Most of it seems to be a desperate attempt by Stephenie Meyer to drive the wordcount a little higher. She accomplishes this by having Edward Cullen and Jacob Black fight a seemingly never-ending tug-of-war over Bella’s affections. The screenwriter of Eclipse, Melissa Rosenberg, seems to have recognized this flaw, just like she recognized the more prominent flaws of both New Moon and Twilight. The only problem is that she doesn’t come up with a similarly elegant solution to the problem at hand, like with the other two Twilight Saga movies. Somehow, by emphasizing the story of Riley, a tiny character in the novel who only emerges on the last forty-odd pages, the plot of Eclipse gets elevated from meandering to labyrinthine.
I saw this movie with a friend who didn’t have the advantage of having read the book. Her blank face thirty minutes in only confirmed my suspicion: Eclipse is for fans of the series only; the uninitiated viewer doesn’t stand a chance in the face of so many short, badly-executed scenes that seem to have no discernible connection to each other.
As I wrote earlier, Melissa Rosenberg saved the first two movies. In New Moon Bella’s sudden suicidal tendencies make a little more sense when she is aware of their connection to Edward’s appearances. In Twilight the ending gets marginally saved by, well… I suppose by not mentioning every five seconds that Alice can see the bloody future. Eclipse has a similar problem in that the ending would be much less exciting if Alice could see what is about to happen. As in Twilight, the screenwriter tries to not discuss the subject too much, to distract the viewer from the gaping plot hole that the novel contains. Look, there, a unicorn! Unfortunately what worked in Twilight only bogs Eclipse down further with uncertainties and unnatural conversations.
I suppose that to the real fans all of this is only garnish anyway. What matters, the meat of the story so to speak, is the love triangle. Jacob vs. Edward. The goal? Bella Swan. On an abstract level I can even understand it. There are hundreds of tales out there of the immortal vampire falling in love with the young, vibrant human. Buffy. Interview with a Vampire. True Blood. But in the case of the Twilight Saga the concept doesn’t work, because all the characters are such miserable caricatures that only an intellectually starved fifteen-year-old might find any appeal in them. And whereas Robert Pattinson’s talent, if not his suspicious absence of good looks, made me feel a little of that appeal in the two previous movie adaptations, all of that is gone in Eclipse. Part of the problem is that Eclipse moves the focus of the love story much closer to Jacob Black. Taylor Lautner is certainly a good match for the character from the novel in that he is of native origin and in that he is… eh… buff. Sadly he fails on the score of acting talent, which doesn’t help when playing a character that is stupid, bland and annoying to begin with.
The part that made it really, really funny for me is that the countless Jacob and Bella scenes in the movie seem to have been copy-pasted into the script. Write one scene, re-use it half a dozen times. Re-use it, I would like to point out, to the point where the phrase until your heart stops beating seems to have been etched into my eardrums with a glowing red iron.
It gets worse. I don’t like Robert Pattinson and I dislike Kristen Stewart even more, but I have to admit that they are well-cast in the Twilight Saga and that they played their parts as well at the script permitted. So far, at least. I don’t know how David Slade did it, in fact I don’t want to know, but he has somehow managed to surgically remove every last trace of both acting talent and screen presence from his two protagonists. Kristen Stewart’s Bella is no more than a weepy, puffy, apathetic brat while Pattinson’s Edward has finally been turned into the marble statue that the novel so often compares him to. A statue, I might add, that more than once seems to turn its pleading, golden eyes to the camera filled with the question why, oh why am I doing this?
I don’t know, Robert, but I feel for you.
All in all, Eclipse is a real disappointment, and if you keep in mind that I am talking about a movie of the Twilight Saga, that is saying something. David Slade may have directed Hard Candy, which I still hold in high regard, but I really don’t know what he thought he was doing when he directed Eclipse. The script needed at least another rewrite, the actors seem directionless and disinterested and even the beautiful landscape around Vancouver seems slightly embarrassed to be part of this motion picture disaster.
Twilight’ drunk? No, not even drunk. ‘Twilight’ on acid? No, not even on acid. ‘Twilight’ at gunpoint? Just shoot me.’
That’s what David Slade tweeted when the first Twilight movie was in the cinemas. In the meantime he has come up with some excuse along the lines of it being more of a poem than a complaint and that he really is a very violent person so… well… eh… yes. I just suppose it isn’t a very good idea to hire someone to direct your movie who really, really hates the franchise, but that’s only poor little me.
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