The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1
Well, I didn’t kill myself. There’s something to be said for that.
Director Bill Condon and composer Carter Burwell try their damndest to make me care about the events unfolding in this fourth film from Stephanie Meyer’s vampire love phenomenon as much as I did about James Whale (the horror director at the heart of Condon’s remarkable film, “Gods and Monsters”) and Dr. Alfred Kinsey (the psychoanalyst whose life inspired Condon’s film, “Kinsey”). Unfortunately, their failure was perhaps inevitable because, unlike with those earlier films, Condon is working with inferior material, and for all the craft the director, making his first film since the Oscar winner, “Dreamgirls,” brings to the film, neither he nor his composer (who is returning to the franchise for the first time since the Condon-less “Twilight”; his music continues to be wasted on this story) can breathe much life into the goings on in this story to satisfy me. Of course, none of these films have done much for me as a moviegoer, so perhaps that was bound to happen.
“Part 1” of the Saga’s two-part finale on-screen has a few key moments for Twi-hards. The first is…Bella and Edward finally get married. (Cue glazed eyes and tears.) The second is…all of that sexual tension that has supposedly been building up over the past three movies between Edward (Robert Pattinson, whose lifeless line readings even extend to the wedding vows; would it kill you to bring a little emotion to THOSE, at least?) and Bella (Kristen Stewart, whose talents as an actress– and yes, she does have some for those unfamiliar with her work in “Adventureland” and “Into the Wild” –can’t hide the character’s general unpleasantness; seriously, she’s a selfish, stupid girl) culminates in a passionate honeymoon that will result in an unlikely pregnancy and the Cullen clan trying to save Bella from the demon growing inside of her. Do they succeed? Does this franchise have one more movie left to come out next year? (The answer is yes, by the way, but I won’t tell how the first one plays out.)
There’s a certain level of irony to having a filmmaker like Condon, who won an Oscar for “Gods and Monsters,” attached to material like this. The bottom line is, the “Twilight” series seems to be little more than a series of trashy romance novels elevated by virtue of their popularity into literary phenomenons on par with “Harry Potter.” The difference, of course, is that there’s a real sense of a heroes’s quest, and a palpable level of danger and life-and-death with the underlying story of J.K. Rowling’s young wizards. For Meyer’s Bella, it’s all about choosing between two guys, Edward and Jacob (Taylor Lautner, who is almost as good a scowl actor as Pattinson is at this point in the series), who inexplicably care for this girl (I refuse to call Bella a woman; in no way does she ever act so responsibly) and, oh, happen to be a vampire and a werewolf, respectively. In the end, the supernatural elements really don’t matter in this series; they aren’t even used substantially enough to qualify as metaphors. Their only real purpose is to add some cool action scenes in between the tedium of the love story plot. Part of the blame for this obviously falls on the series’s screenwriter, Melissa Rosenberg (a former “Dexter” writer showing none of that talent here), but more so on Meyer for her shallow source material.
Next year, the “Twilight Saga” will be finished on the big screen, as Condon brings the rest of “Breaking Dawn” to life on-screen. After the events in “Part 1,” however, I’m curious as to how much is really left to be told in this story. The seemingly jam-packed events of the first film, which ends with not one but TWO big revelations, I can’t imaging much of what’s remains of Meyer’s story is more than just filler for the sake of splitting the tale into two films for the sake of greater profit. Of course, the credits cookie that we see midway through “Part 1’s” end acknowledgments points to a more complicated conclusion than I might be giving it credit for. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be holding my breath to see how it all plays out, though.
