In honour of this occasion - namely the end of the semester - I wanted to share with you one of my works I had to do for one of my courses at the English Seminar this semester. It's a review, something which I haven't done (professionally) before. A review about the new Twilight movie: Breaking Dawn - Part1.
via here
(Be warned: In case you are a true Twilight fan, you'd better not read this or you'd probably like to tear me apart just like Jacob does with his wedding invitation. Also, if you haven't seen the movie "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" yet and intend to do so you shouldn't read it as well. There will be spoilers!)
So here we go:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are going to have a caesarean, it is not a good idea to have vampires in the room. Breaking Dawn, Part 1 does it nonetheless. The fourth movie of the Twilight saga is just like every other Twilight movie, only a few things change: glitter-vampire Edward Cullen still looks like a marble statue covered in talc, only now he wears shorts. The werewolves now argue telepathically with each other in English, which is just silly. And the great, melancholic soundtrack from Muse has been exchanged by dull and annoying pop songs that underscore every moment.
The audience, mostly 16-year-old teenage girls, seems to enjoy it and the Twi-hards certainly will not be disappointed. Breaking Dawn, Part 1 picks up where Eclipse left off; feisty yet droopy 18-year-old Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her stone cold hottie, the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), aged 108, are about to get married. The wedding is so kitsch that anyone not obsessed with hair and make-up may find it a seemingly endless half-hour of near-death experience.
Bella and Edward then fly to Brazil to a luxurious honeymoon hideaway on an island, where the morning after her wedding-night Bella wakes black and blue with bruises and all the furniture is broken. But apart from a passionless foreplay accompanied by the world’s worst pop music, the movie does not show us what happened. The most eagerly awaited deflowering in recent movie history takes place completely off-screen. From there it is on to the speediest pregnancy in history, and an alarmingly gruesome and bloody childbirth.
Teenage girls will probably be less interested in the story bordering on an abortion-debate than in the earliest point where the werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner), Edward's rival for Bella's affection, rips off his shirt, which is within the first seconds of the movie. Jacob's muscles have been one of the most special of the movies' effects and that seems reason enough to get the character's shirt off as often as possible. These filmmakers certainly know their audience.
The Hollywood machinery has a firm grip on the Twilight saga. One may wonder about the creative benefits of following the Harry Potter model and dividing the final Twilight book into two movies. In terms of economics, however, the decision is certainly a winner. The previous Twilight movies Eclipse and New Moon pale in comparison with Breaking Dawn in terms of revenues and number of visitors. But whereas the Potter series gained from that decision, the Twilight Saga loses almost all its momentum.
The general difficulty of bringing page to screen is inherent already in the Twilight cast. Kirsten Steward manages to play exactly one face throughout all the four movies, stealing her heroine Bella Swan all depth of character. However, giving credit where it is due, Bella Swan's pregnancy is brilliant on paper. On celluloid, it is simply a joke. What Stephanie Meyer did so brilliantly in her book is lost in the movie.
Maybe the studios have begun to believe that they, like the classy Cullen clan, are immortal and that almost nothing can kill them. They better hope that it is true, because Breaking Dawn, Part 1 sucks - in the metaphoric rather than the vampiric sense. The film does not have the bite that a vampire romance should have. It is as if all the life has drained away. A great number of its 117 minutes feel like hours, and whenever certain actors take the lead, time seems to crawl backward and Breaking Dawn begins to feel like yesterday's breaking dawn or Thursday’s.
I'm open to any kind of criticism, but bear in mind that one cannot argue about taste. I'm sure some people (in fact quite many) liked the movie... and I'm not attacking them. I'm just communicating my own opinion.
xo xo linskaya
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