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.
