Rating: D
Dir: David Slade
Star: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Bryce Dallas Howard
Thank god that’s over. It struck me mid-way through this, that the problem is not the Twilight-verse as such. There are a lot of potentially quite interesting stories in there, with an almost infinite scope for imagination, and a world that runs parallel to ours, just out of view. However, the love-triangle of Bella, Edward and Jacob is perhaps the most tedious and boring of them; imagine if the Harry Potter books focused heavily on the Harry/Hermione/Ron romance aspects. This eventually builds to an epic battle against an army of newly-created vampires led by Victoria (Howard), who is still righteously pissed at Edward for killing her soul-mate, and a very uneasy alliance between the vampires and werewolves, united by the love of their clan member for Bella.
It’s actually pretty damn cool, and it’s just a shame that the key-word in the previous sentence is “eventually”. For before that, we have a lot of Bellangst and macho posturing between Edward and Mr. Shirtoff [I complained bitterly about the way his female packmate does not run around topless for the entire film…]. Basically, it just repeats the same mistakes of the first two movies, being way too long, and obsessing on themes like Bella’s abstinence, which don’t exactly improve with repetition. Neither do the performances of the two leads, which have shown almost little or no development or character arc since we first met them: Bella now appears a whiny, co-dependent nuisance, and Edward a control-obsessed stalker. I guess that makes them perfect for each other.
But fun to watch – not so much… As before, the main pleasures are to be found in the supporting characters on the fringe, who give a glimpse of what might have been. By this stage, however, it’s clear that the aim was simply to churn out more of what had gone before, and given how (inexplicably) successful that was, it’s hard to blame the studio for this conservative approach. And that’s an excellent way to sum up the entire series. Who needs imagination and risk-taking when you can make hundreds of millions playing safe?