'Breaking Dawn': Let's hope it's the final chapter
Like the dandelion weeds that choke the grass in my yard, the "Twilight" films are merely an inconvenient inevitability that I must accept. Despite my best attempts to ignore them, they will periodically spring up, invade with ferocity, and I can find comfort knowing they will soon float away on the breeze like a forgotten memory.
The latest infestation is the overly punctuated title "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1." But criticizing the film's title is just being petty and mean, especially considering there are so many other aspects of the film worthy of ridicule.
Let us not start there, though. Let me catalog the improvement made in this installment (yes, that was singular on purpose), mostly thanks to director Bill Condon, who tries to add as much splash as possible to the film's puddle-deep plot. While Condon's a far cry from his work helming "Gods and Monsters"'and "Kinsey," he at least adds some moments of levity and skillful transitions to make brief stretches somewhat tolerable for non-Twi-hards.
"Breaking Dawn" takes a cue from the "Harry Potter" franchise and severs the last of the novels into two films. It is referred to as a "bridge" picture, but I've crossed sturdier structures by throwing downed limbs across a stream.
In it, our heroes Bella (played by Kristen Stewart, who here almost manages to curl her lips upward in what we humans call a "smile") and her glittery, toothless vampire/boyfriend Edward (played by Robert Pattinson, still being upstaged by his glorious head of hair) are making final wedding preparations.
Following suit with the books' overriding themes, suffering and repression mark the event and all the happenings thereafter. First, we must endure wedding-prep porn, featuring countless music montages of detailed provisions that make leafing through an issue of Modern Bride seem positively electric. Then, we encounter the chaste consummation that leads to Bella's pregnancy (you have to give Edward credit: he's over a century in age and manages to knock her up on the first try!). We soon realize that the little bloodsucker swimming in her belly is quite parasitic and is literally siphoning the life right out of her.
This enrages her former beau Jacob (played by a slab of abdominal muscles with a head named Taylor Lautner), a werewolf that splinters from his pack in order to protect her and her mutant demon seed.
The rest boils down to territorial pissing (some quite literal) and the Bella battle rages on, and try as Condon might, we are still stuck with the questionably literate source material on which the film is based. The director pads the film with montages...oh, so many, many montages, and tosses in a few creative transitions, but nothing can overcome the Harlequin-level hilarity of the film's dialogue that even Fabio himself would find beneath him.
The most frustrating aspect of the entire "Twilight" series is the way it so cavalierly dismisses centuries of vampire lore. Imagine someone making a zombie film in which the undead were considered life-challenged lovers of humanity that preferred hugs over human brains. Condon is also hampered by his cast of shoe-gazing mannequins. While it is still confounding why Edward would throw away an eternity of hooking up with high school chicks for the mope-tastic Bella, there is not a second of believability that beings with the tissue-thin talents of Lautner and his hairy horde of werewolves could transform into menacing beasts.
Things wrap up rather succinctly by the closing credits, and we can only hope that this will leave the final chapter with nothing but bloody tribal battles among them all. But I have a feeling that no matter who wins that skirmish, we shall all still lose.
