The last week of the autumn semester at University is dawning. There is light on the horizon. Finally!
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.
(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
