The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

Spoiler Alert: The last act is discussed in length. If you haven’t seen it yet, you probably never will so just go ahead and read it anyway, just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Going into Eclipse, I was hoping for some truly messed up stuff. Director David Slade has made some disturbing stuff. His debut, Hard Candy, was about a pedophile getting tortured by Ellen Page for two hours and 30 Days of Night has a spectacular display of graphic vampire violence. Twilight certainly had the pedophilia going for it and New Moon seemed to be ramping up the violence, leading me to believe that Eclipse could actually shape up to be a dark, violent and disturbing flick.

My first disturbance with the film was looking out at the audience. I went to an early showing to avoid all the giggly teen girls only to discover something far worse: a roomful of ten-year-olds with their mothers. Their mothers (and one was at least 8 months pregnant)! When I was 10, my mother took me to go see A Bug’s Life, a film about a loser ant who becomes a hero.

These mothers decided to drag their kids to a film about a woman falling in love with monsters. If I hadn’t blown my last Abraham on the film, I would have donated to these poor kids’ therapy fund. Even worse, these women giggled throughout the film like teenaged girls. The first two films I had the good fortune of watching in isolation, I might wait for the same circumstances for the next film. Sadly, this was the most disturbing part of my experience watching the film, the rest played out like a slightly better version of New Moon.

At the end of the last movie, super-creep abstinent vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) asked Bella to marry her. He then proceeds to ask her about 4 times over the course of this film but Bella is more interested in skipping to the sex then vampire bit . Persistence isn’t always a virtue, Edward. Speaking of persistence, super-buff werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) shows up to find that shirt he lost about two films ago and decides he’s gonna make Bella love him.

This should lead to some dark, messed up love triangle stuff but, unfortunately, it’s far too antiseptic. The worst is a stolen kiss. Come on, I want to see some creepy monster stalking at least. How about some really bad come on lines? Okay, there are a few of those. It feels at this point the series should evolve into a dark and mature place but it hesitates, afraid to commit to that path, content to idyllically wander back into the tone of the previous films.

Restraint is what’s holding back this film from being truly gripping. The stakes are higher than ever and the dramatics even stronger, but it’s all held back, internalized too much. A soon as things come to a head, they dissipate just as quickly. It means that something interesting is always going on, but the conflicts introduced in the first act are simply repeated for the duration instead of adding them on gradually. Ultimately, it’s a minor quibble but just a part of an overarching problem.

A big part of the problem with this film is that the violence has no weight. There are a few awesome action set-pieces and yet none of them are as life threatening or viscerally appalling as they should be. Vampires, when ripped apart, break like shards of ice, which is aesthetically dull. Would it be so bad to have some blood? Come on, you hired the guy who made 30 Days of Night and you don’t even let him have blood when someone dies? Still, these set-pieces are fast, distinct and kinetic.

However, there aren’t nearly enough of them. At this point you’ve rooked in just about every female that is going to watch this series, why not make it a bit more appealing to males and make this as an action flick? It’s not as if you’re progressing the plot or shifting the mood in this film. Get some more of that testosterone in the mix and you’ll open yourself up to an even better audience, as well as make this a distinct entry in the series.

But even then, the film has a larger problem: there’s no sense of sacrifice in the film. With the stakes this high and the dramatics this tight, a great way to build tension is to have people lay their lives on the lines and maybe even lose it. Here, no one good in the film comes close to dying; the most harrowing thing that happens to the good guys is a few broken bones. The films have gone on about Bella putting people’s lives at risk but what does it matter if none of them ever die?

And the film even has a fantastic setup for some character deaths. In the previous two films, the ancillary characters have been just that, but in this film a lot of secondary characters get a good amount of screen time and most of them get at least one great scene focused on them. The film has several of these fantastic historical flashbacks for the Cullen vampires, one of the best being the story of Jasper Hale (Jackson Rathbone) and how he created an army of vampires during the civil war.

Not only is it cool, but it makes us interested in the characters and actually likeable. Imagine if Alice Cullen (Asheley Greene), possibly the cutest and most innocent character in the series, had bit the dust? How would that have changed the tone of the picture? Instead, the most disturbing death takes place in the aftermath of the battle and, while it’s messed up, it’s for a character who has three 10 second scenes.

But as much as I’m complaining about this, it’s fascinating to watch the villain orchestrates this master plot. Plus, it’s nice to see that Bryce Dallas Howard is getting work again. Seriously, that girl’s got talent and needs to be in more films, she just the misfortune of being in Spider-Man 3. The film tries to present the whole construction of a vampire army as some kind of mystery, but it’s fairly obvious who is behind it all from the get go and it’s not what the film is about.

The films about hot dudes not wearing shirts and stealing kisses from Bella who becomes pretty skanky in this film, leading on both Edward and Jacob. There’s a pretty great scene where all three of them are stuck in a tent and Bella is asleep. Edward and Jacob have a totally awkward and insightful conversation. It’s moments like this where the film works. It’s corny and silly but somehow it comes off as sincere. It might be misplaced sincerity or silly teen melodrama but somehow someway, the film sells it.

At this point in the film, it’s clear that the serious has become reiterative. It’s akin to the first three Harry Potter books, which were the exact same story, just with different details. It took Harry Potter till the fourth book to start entering the really dark and powerful stuff, something I hope is in store for Twilight. Maybe the series will end with Jacob killing vampire Bella or something. That would be rad. Or maybe Bella and Edward will have mutant gothic monster babies who go on to star in a sitcom about misunderstood monsters in Manhattan who eat people. That would be great. In short, what I’m saying is that someone needs to die and it needs to happen soon.