Year 12, Day 282 - 10/8/20 - Movie #3,670
BEFORE: As expected, this franchise is going to wreak havoc on my year-end breakdown, where I usually list all the actors who appear in three or more films. Now it looks like half of that list will be the cast of "Twilight"! A full 27 actors carry over from yesterday's "Twilight: Eclipse" movie, and that could be a record, I'm not sure. My year end re-cap is going to be very boring, just a bunch of "Twilight" actors and a few other people. But it had to happen, I suppose, in order to clear this franchise off my books. And linking-wise, this is the way to do it, it would make no sense to spread them out one per year, to mimic the way the films were initially released. Better to binge them all in a week's time, much easier on the record-keeping, but harder on the old gray matter. Time to buckle down, because there's just one film left after today - I'll take Friday off and wrap things up on Saturday.
THE PLOT: The Quileutes close in on expecting parents Edward and Bella, whose unborn child poses a threat to the Wolf Pack and the townspeople of Forks.
AFTER: SPOILERS AHEAD for the "Twilight" franchise, even though I'm probably one of the LAST people to take in this whole franchise. Though now that I'm four films in, and the fourth film takes such a drastic turn, I think maybe if you're like me and you haven't seen these all yet, you may want to stop after three. "Eclipse" kind of felt like the high-water mark, story-wise, and it doesn't look like it gets better from there on out, it's just kind of...MORE.
What's worse is that this franchise spent three films clearly setting up the rules of human and vampire relationships - even though those rules themselves established something of an impasse. Edward, being a super-strong vampire, can't have a typical physical relationship with Bella, for the same reason that Superman can't get it on with Lois Lane. It's just too dangerous if he should lose control, and in the movies, sex is apparently all about losing control. An orgasm, by definition, is a form of temporary insanity, but without being graphic, I think it's a big leap from a temporary brain-burst of pleasure to "Whoops, I accidentally crushed her." If Superman or Edward Cullen can pick up a glass of water and not break it, then they can probably both make sweet love to their partners without harm. Right? Then again, I'm currently watching Season 2 of "Jessica Jones" on Netflix and when she gets drunk, she tends to break a lot of glasses at her local bar. So maybe there's something to this.
Anyway, for three movies, we'd been led to believe that Edward and Bella couldn't, you know, DO IT until she'd also been turned into a vampire. But that just wasn't enough for precious Bella, was it? She begged and begged to become a real member of the Cullen family, and then even though she was just on the cusp of getting everything she wanted, she suddenly wanted more. Right? So finally Edward agreed to do the thing that supposedly impossible, just to make her happy, and yeah, she ends up scratched and bruised. This is some weird, backwards take on an abusive relationship, I think. He loved her enough to hurt her, only not as much as he could have? Anyway, that's effed up - and not a positive move forward for intersex or interspecies relationships.
Worse, we get to spend like an hour with Edward and Bella on their honeymoon, which, aside from the occasional forbidden coupling, was filled with a lot of beach-combing and playing chess. Right. Who the FRICK plays chess on their honeymoon? All right, now if you haven't read the books or seen the movies, I really really urge you to stop reading now. Go away - get lost, tatty-bye.
As mentioned in the logline, and as everyone else but me probably knows by now, Bella gets knocked up on her honeymoon. Not just pregnant, like super-pregnant, super-FAST pregnant that is, she's already starting to show like a week later, instead of the usual three (?) months. This baby's coming with vampire super-speed development or something. Now, a couple of issues with this, first, of course WTF? First we were told that sex between a human and vampire was not recommended, and from their reactions, it would seem that conception in this instance would be impossible, or at least that's what they were told. BUT, did they even ASK? Or was it never even brought up, because what IDIOT vampire would have sex with a human woman when she'd probably die in the process? So, very likely, they didn't even ask. Or it's technically impossible, which brings me back to WTF? How can it happen if it's impossible, if Edward's no longer human, or not technically alive. But then again, somehow vampires are both undead AND immortal, and that's a blatant contradiction if ever there was one - so this pregnancy is both impossible AND it's happening.
Still, shouldn't somebody have used protection? Even if they thought the pregnancy was impossible, there's still all kinds of human-to-vampire or vampire-to-human STDs that could be possible, right? OK, maybe nobody ever gave Bella "the talk" about protection, plus she was a virgin up to her wedding day, I guess, but didn't she ever do like over-the-pants stuff with anybody? Totally clueless? OK, then I would expect Edward to know better, but I guess if he's like 110 years old then he's got a really outdated view of morality, hence marriage before sex, and he was probably last sexually active before they invented the pill and diaphragms and maybe even latex condoms. But again, without getting graphic, couldn't they have just fooled around without risking conception? It HAD to be intercourse? This is what we get for having a backwards sexual education system in our schools that doesn't inform teens about anything but missionary, when really, there's a whole wide range of stuff that doesn't lead to pregnancy.
But I'm taking this out on the characters, and they're not even real. It's really the simplistic view of the author, who is, in a sense, represented in all of her characters. It HAD to be this way, because that's what propels the storyline forward in the most dramatic way. When Bella gets back to Forks, suddenly it's a whole new controversy between the Cullen vampires and the Native American werewolves, who perceive her unborn baby as both an abomination and a threat to their culture and community. Really, it's a whole pro-choice/pro-life argument laid out symbolically, only with a twist - the mother's on the pro-life side and the community wants to terminate the pregnancy. And once again, Jacob's caught in the middle, he wants to support Bella, but this puts him on the opposite side as the rest of his werewolf clan, and of course, again he blames Edward for everything. He's not totally wrong, but he's not totally right either.
By comparison, this one's incredibly slow, and very little happens, at least in the first half. Even then, there's barely any action even when the werewolves attack the vampires in the second half. To say that this film makes little sense almost goes without saying, and NITPICK POINTS abound - like how come a man who turns into a werewolf, and presumably hunts and kills animals as one, gets sick just watching a human drink a little blood? And all the ones I listed above concerning inter-species pregnancy...but at this point, I just want to soldier on to the end and be done with it all.
Sarring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Billy Burke, Sarah Clarke, Julia Jones, Booboo Stewart, Chaske Spencer, Gil Birmingham, Anna Kendrick, Christian Serratos, Justin Chon, Michael Welch, Alex Rice, Kiowa Gordon, Tyson Houseman, Bronson Pelletier, Alex Meraz, Tinsel Korey, Daniel Cudmore, Charlie Bewley (all last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse") Michael Sheen (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"), Jamie Campbell Bower (ditto), Christopher Heyerdahl (ditto), MyAnna Buring, Maggie Grace (last seen in "Supercon"), Casey LaBow, Mackenzie Foy (last heard in "The Little Prince"), Christian Camargo (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Mia Maestro (last seen in "Savages"), Olga Fonda (last seen in "Real Steel"), Ty Olsson (last seen in "The Shack"), Tanaya Beatty (last seen in "Hostiles"), Sienna Joseph, Carolina Virguez, Sebastiao Lemos, Ali Faulkner, Christie Burke, with a cameo from Stephenie Meyer (last seen in "Twilight") and archive footage of Edi Gathegi (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon")
RATING: 4 out of 10 unnecessary wedding toasts
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