The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2

Year 12, Day 284 - 10/10/20 - Movie #3,671

BEFORE: I made it to the end of the franchise, the last film in the "Twilight" series, within a week's time - I'm pretty much on schedule for October, but I still have to work four more skip days in before the end of the month, if I want the last horror film to line up with Halloween - which I think is on October 31 this year.  But since the next four films are on various streaming services, I want to get through them as quickly as possible, because streaming films don't reduce my main watchlist, which only tracks films I have on DVD or my DVR.  And I don't allow myself to add any films to the main watchlist until I cross some off, so I can't add the new films now on cable until I get through another four films.  So no skip days for a while, even though I need to add them somewhere.  It's complicated.  

Right now, the last "Twilight" film is a bit like those food bits in the sink drain, I don't really want to deal with them, but once they're gone, I'm thinking things will start flowing again.  So sometimes you just have to hold your nose, not look too closely, and bring that drain cover over to the trash can and scrape the gunk out of it.  OK, it's a terrible analogy but maybe you can guess what chore I took care of yesterday.  

26 actors carry over from "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1", but it's not all the same actors who carried over last time - it's very complicated, and it's been a nightmare keeping track of it all.  But the nightmare is over today, and we never need speak of it again, not until the year-end wrap-up, anyway. 

THE PLOT: After the birth of Renesmee, the Cullens gather other vampire clans in order to protect the child from a false allegation that puts the family in front of the Volturi. 

AFTER: If you discount the parts of "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" that were boring, then also the parts that were horribly pro-life, then also the parts where very little happened, you'd essentially be discounting the whole film.  And I'd kind of be OK with that.  If it wasn't narratively necessary to do so, I'd suggest skipping "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" and moving straight on to the last film.  But that might also be my personal opinion, which comes directly from watching all five films in seven days, which I do not recommend anyone else take on.  Remember, I'm a professional, so don't try this at home, you could get seriously hurt.  Me, I'm just frustrated and disappointed, but I'm pretty sure I'll recover.  

This final film is (more or less) a return to form after we got Bella's horrific honeymoon and enigmatic troubled pregnancy out of the way.  Picking the place to divide the final book into two films should have been a no-brainer, but they blew it, and if you're familiar with the films, you know exactly what I'm talking about.  They should have ended the film about 30 seconds before they did, but I guess since most of the people in the theater audiences knew the complete plot of the book, they thought there was no need to cut it there, and in fact what essentially became a teaser for the next film probably seemed like a good idea, but then again, it was also a terrible idea.  Even if there are just a FEW people in the theater who don't know what's got to happen in the next film, they should have tried to preserve a tiny bit of the element of surprise for the non-readers, such as myself.  The ending of "Breaking Dawn - Part 1" should have been more like the ending of "Avengers: Infinity War", if you catch my drift.  Walking home from "Infinity War", it did hit me what would probably happen in "Endgame", but since I'm a comic-book fan, it didn't take much thought for me to figure it out.  

SPOILER ALERT -  stop reading here if you've never read the books or seen these movies, although this is a bit unnecessary if I was indeed the last person to get around to them.  Here there was no lingering mystery, Bella's somehow FINE, and better than ever, after essentially dying during childbirth, thanks to finally getting the change that she's been begging for for three movies now.  She's become immortal, and a true member of the Cullen undead clan, so, umm, yay?  Congratulations on being turned into a bloodsucking vampire, and now she'll live forever and watch all of her human friends and family die while she stays the same age.  Oh, and now she drinks blood and sparkles in the sunlight, and for some reason she'll have to move every few years and keep re-living high school over and over again.  Jeez, can't she just show everybody her diploma and not have to do that?  Also, for some reason she now has to fight the basic urge to kill humans that comes along with her new powers, and drink only the blood of animals, which is quite ironic, because wasn't she like a vegetarian before?  On the upside, if she hangs out with the Cullens she now gets to be really smug and sanctimonious about not killing humans, which seems to be a fundamental part of being a vampire, so why deny it?  

But before the film gets to the exciting bits, there are some leftover agenda items to deal with.  First, it seems that Jacob "imprinted" on the baby Renesmee, which doesn't mean that he's in love with her, it only means that he has a strong bond and would do anything to protect her, even die for her, and who knows, maybe when she's 18 or 20 years older, he'll be romantically involved with her, even though it's very, very wrong to think about a baby that way.  Except it kind of seems like he's totally thinking about having sex with a baby, just trying to picture her as a teenager or an adult, but that's still wrong wrong wrong, right? He couldn't have a relationship with Bella, so he's marking his territory to have one with her daughter?  Again, this just feels super-wrong and icky, but what do I know, it worked out for Woody Allen, didn't it?

We're then shown some very creepy footage of a CGI baby, which I've also got an issue with.  Couldn't they just have used ANY baby, since all babies essentially look alike?  It's true, they do, so I don't understand why anybody posts pictures of their baby, who looks just like every other baby I've ever seen.  All that "She's got your eyes, but her father's nose!" crap is just a bunch of B.S.  It's a BABY, big fat hairy deal.  But not this baby - they somehow deep-faked this baby's face, and it just didn't look right.  Jesus, if you're going to CGI a baby's face at least make it look realistic instead of like an alien baby.  I get that you can't get a real baby to act in a film and give you the facial expressions you need, but still, that's no excuse for what we're shown here.  

Renesmee (still the worst baby name I've ever heard, I think) grows very rapidly, though, in just a few months she looks like a five-year old girl, and suddenly we realize why Jacob is still hanging around, because he's done the math and he's probably getting excited. (Again, EEEEWWWWWW!)  Renesmee's not a vampire, but she's somehow half-vampire?  Only she doesn't drink blood, she eats regular food, and she's apparently the only person in the Cullen family that does that.  Even in the vampire world, she's an anomaly, an impossiblity, so when another vampire sees here, she's easily mistaken for what they call an "immortal child", which is what happens when a vampire turns a small child into a vampire, and you end up getting an unholy creature with incredible powers with the short temper and volatile emotions of a child.  The vampire community had some in the past, apparently, and it didn't work out well - and it doesn't work very well when you elect someone like that President, either.  OK, lesson learned, now we know. 

So someone drops a dime on the Cullens and the Volturi Council gets involved, making plans to come and visit the Cullens to stop this "immortal child".  Alice has a premonition about this, and so naturally when Alice learns of the coming danger, she disappears to parts unknown.  Wait, what?  The ONE time they need their precog more than ever before, and she takes off?  But she leaves her family members a warning, they have to contact family and old friends, gather witnesses to meet Renesmee, get to know her and realize that she's not a child vampire.  The more witnesses, the greater the chance that the Volturi will listen to reason.  (This seems a bit like the #Metoo movement from a couple years ago, when the court of public opinion might not believe one allegation against a celebrity, but when there were thirty or forty against Cosby or Weinstein, people started to figure out that maybe where there's an overwhelming amount of smoke, there might be a fire.)

Vampires gather from all over to help the Cullens, bear witness about Renesmee, or just to pick a fight with the Volturi - whichever reason they show up, it's all good.  It doesn't matter what they wear, just as long as they are there. So every guy, grab a ghoul - it's just an invitation, across the vampire nation.  Vampires from Alaska, Brazil, India, Russia, Ireland, show up to swap war stories and wait for their chance to either testify or have a really good fight.  It's the showdown in the snow town, the Battle in Seattle, the test in the Northwest.  It's the liberal vampires who stand WITH werewolves against the conservative ones who can't stand werewolves - a fight against closed-mindedness and monster racism, really.  Oh, if only there were some kind of real-world analogy playing out in current events right now...

Ultimately the ending here is very cagey, there's a way for the battle to both happen and NOT happen, and I can't decide if that's really clever or just a phenomenal cop-out.  Since I'm riding high and feeling good about clearing this franchise, I'm going to go with clever for now, but if you want to argue "cop-out", I'm certainly willing to entertain the argument.  

There's an extended credits sequence, which looks like it might have been left over from when "Breaking Dawn" was planned to be one movie, not two - only that doesn't make much sense, either.  It's more of a flashback to all the actors who played vampires in any or all of the "Twilight" films, but this causes something of a cataloguing paradox for me, because archive footage of actors who were NOT in this final film was used.  That's a bit like appearing in this film, even though they DIDN'T appear in the film.  So, do I count those actors as being in "Breaking Dawn - Part 2" or not?  Footage was used, so that should count as an appearance - but it's during a credit sequence, which is not within the film itself.  What to do? 

I've decided to discount these actors - which includes Bella's human high-school friends (Sorry, Team Mike) and the deceased vampires from the first two films (even though one of them counted yesterday, but that was a flashback during the film itself, not the credits)  But I'm not going to include the 15 or so actors whose archive footage was used at the end of "Breaking Dawn - Part 2" because just appearing in the credits doesn't count - it's like that thought problem about the book in the library that lists all the other books in the library.  Should that book list itself?  Yes, because it's a book in the library, too, but also no, because its purpose is really to list all the OTHER books in the library, plus listing itself seems too self-reflexive to me.  So since this visual credit list was something of a tribute to the actors across the whole series, and these appearancess are considered to be outside of the narrative of "Breaking Dawn - Part 2", I'm not listing them here, or in the year-end breakdown.  And if you see Anna Kendrick listing five "Twilight" films on her resumé instead of four, then she's full of it.  

Now that this franchise is off the books, it's full steam ahead with other non-Twilight horror movies.  But what other franchises that I have completely avoided until now should I consider paying attention to in the future?  The "Purge" franchise?  "Transformers" films?  Movies that are both "Fast and Furious"?  "Rambo" movies?  I don't feel like I'm ready for any of those.  I've got to think about this, like a lot more before I take on another series in this manner.  

Also starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Billy Burke, Mackenzie Foy, Maggie Grace, Michael Sheen, Jamie Campbell Bower, Christopher Heyerdahl, Casey LaBow, MyAnna Buring, Christian Camargo, Mia Maestro, Booboo Stewart, Daniel Cudmore, Ty Olsson, Charlie Bewley, Julia Jones, Chaske Spencer, Alex Rice (all carrying over from "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1"), Dakota Fanning (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse"), Cameron Bright (ditto), Lee Pace (last seen in "A Single Man"), Noel Fisher, Joe Anderson (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Rami Malek (last seen in "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb"), Judith Shekoni, Billy Wagenseller, JD Pardo, Wendell Pierce (last seen in  "Lay the Favorite"), Lateef Crowder, Andrea Powell (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Toni Trucks, Andrea Gabriel, Austin Naulty, Marissa Quinn, Omar Metwally (last seen in "Rendition"), Valorie Curry, Tracey Heggins, Guri Weinberg, Erik Odom, Bill Tangradi (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Patrick Brennan (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Lisa Howard, Marlane Barnes, Amadou Ly, Janelle Froehlich, Masami Kosaka, Erica LaRose.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Christmas presents