 |
| The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011) |
Jesus Christ, where do I begin? Well, I'll start with this: this 2 hour movie could easily have been done in 30 minutes. I'm serious. This could all have been done in Act 1 of a movie. This is what I was expecting from the 'split the last book into 2 movies' trend; it's pathetically obvious this was split up for the sake of the money. The movie doesn't even try to hide it. There are sequences of this movie that drag out for the most unnecessary reasons. Bella's walk down the aisle lasts 2 minutes. 2 F***ING MINUTES! I don't care that this is what it's all been leading towards and this was the moment so many fans were looking forward to, nobody needs two minutes to walk 10 metres. The actual 'plot' of this movie doesn't even begin until about the halfway mark. Everything before that is effectively padding. It's stretching out the runtime to the point where we need a montage of Edward withholding sex from Bella on their honeymoon (which features 3 different games of chess), only for them to get it on in the very next scene for no discernable reason. Apparently, in the book, that sequence took up two whole chapters. Good God, this is the kind of stuff you cut OUT for the final movie. You don't need to make two movies just so you can keep the chess games.
 |
| Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen and Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan |
Oh, and the plot itself? Classic example of the Twilight syndrome. What's the Twilight syndrome, I hear you ask? It's when a movie takes a story or a situation that should be interesting, but makes it boring as sin somehow. A human gets pregnant with a half-vampire baby that's slowly killing her from the inside. That should be an amazing story, or at the very least an interesting one. And, meanwhile the werewolf pack are having somewhat of a coup over said baby and want to stop it from being born so they decide to kill the mother, this should be great to watch. But it just isn't. There are specific moments that are interesting, and in the past I've given the Twilight franchise points for said sequences, but I think I'm numb to it at this point. This movie doesn't get a pass. It's the only way it'll learn. No, these plots are wasted on characters that you don't care about and the focus is put on a relationship that doesn't interest you, so the whole thing falls apart. Even the cool werewolf treason has such a dissatisfying ending so as to make the entire plotline entirely pointless. Nothing changes. The balance doesn't change. The movie just makes up a new rule completely out of nowhere and just like that everything's fine. No stakes, no consequences, no nothing.
 |
| Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black |
Oh, and did I mention that the characters are boring as f***? Because they are. Bella and Edward's relationship continues to be bland as anything, and even though the two actors are trying now, the damage has been done. Besides, the movie doesn't give the two anything interesting to do, so it's irrelevant. Jacob's just as whiny as he's always been, but this movie somehow finds a way to make it even more creepy. Why does he fall in love with a baby? The movie tries to pass it off as a 'protector' kind of thing, but earlier films (and scenes from this film) make it clear what happened: he fell in love with a baby. You can't come back from that. Someone wrote that. Someone thought that it was a good idea to put pen to paper that a werewolf fell in love with a human-vampire hybrid baby. It's just as creepy as it was when you heard about it the first time. The other members of the Cullen household are almost pathetically sidelined here, despite most of the action taking place in their own house. This movie even commits the cardinal sin and makes Charlie Swan, the only legitimately great character in this franchise, completely useless. He does nothing. He barely says anything. he hardly has any screentime. You done f***ed up now, movie. You done f***ed up now.
 |
| Billy Burke as Charlie Swan |
And then there's the final matter and that's simply that this movie is poorly made. It's a poorly made movie. True, the werewolves look a little better than they did when they first appeared in this series, but they still look horrible. And I would like to travel back in time just so I could kill the person who thought that the CGI baby was a good idea, but it goes beyond the CGI. I kept noticing little mistakes that I just couldn't look past. Like in the first scene where the guy in the wheelchair reaches down to pick something up and his leg clearly moves of its own accord. Or when we see Bella looking in a mirror and her reflection moves independent of her actual person. Or when Bella gets bitten by something and it causes blood to appear, but in the very next shot there's no blood and there never was again for the rest of the scene. I'm sorry, this is just inexcusable. It's not that hard to shoot a movie to avoid all these inconsistencies. This movie made over 5 times as much money as was in its budget. Over $700 million and this is the end result? How does a movie this bad make over $700 million? I want to make $700 million for making the cinematic equivalent of a child drawing stick figures that are just heads with lines coming out of them and they're all different sizes and there are errors everywhere. Because that's what this movie is. It's just uninteresting people doing things for 2 hours. Not even interesting things. They should be interesting things, but they're not.
 |
| A CGI abomination as Renesme Cullen (this made $700 million!!!) |
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011) made me angry. It made me very, very angry. There's only been one movie I've ever reviewed that made me as angry as this. And this movie gets the exact same treatment. 0/10. Oh, God, there's another one of these, isn't there? F***!
Tomorrow: we enter the final week of Must-See May, with one film left in every franchise. We kick things off by returning to Middle Earth for the last time in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
No comments:
Post a Comment