A Girl's Choice Between Necrophilia and Bestiality (Eclipse Review)

In the weeks leading up to the release of Eclipse, my wife and her female coworkers planned to watch Twilight one week, New Moon the next, and then go see Eclipse the following week when it came out, and I decided to join them for each foray into the dark and "exciting" world of Forks, Washington.  Save for one of the girls' boyfriends appearing for New Moon, I contained the only Y chromosome in all our viewing parties.  Being a psych major and working in a children's research lab, this really wasn't much new to me, though I found it funny that the other boyfriends and such made it a point to have Starcraft LAN parties during these viewings.

Watching Twilight and, to a less extent, New Moon with a group as opposed to alone was kind of like watching an episode of "Mystery Science Theater 3000", the brilliant show where a guy and his two robot pals are forced to watch the worst old movies ever made but just end up making fun of it the whole time.  Both Twilight films are positively atrocious for more reasons than I could possibly write here.  I'll just sum their faults up by saying that the acting was a crime against humanity, the directing embarrassing to watch, and the writing positively painful.  Essentially, Bella Swan is a wholly unremarkable girl who moves from Arizona (where her mom lives) to Forks, Washington (where her dad lives) and suddenly becomes the heartthrob of the school for no reason other than that she's new.  She takes an interest in Edward, one of five adopted children of the town's doctor, Carlisle Cullen.  After a while, she discovers that Edward is a vampire, and they sit and smell each other and adore each other until some outside vampires who dine on humans (the Cullens only eat non-human animals) enter the area and, of course, take after Bella because apparently her smell is intoxicating.  There's a chase, a very stupid fight, the kiddos go to prom, and voila!  You have Twilight.  New Moon is basically the same, only in this one Edward leaves town and Bella instead takes up with Jacob, who is a werewolf.  They repair motorcycles together and generally have a good time until Bella goes cliffjumping and then has to go save Edward from being killed in Italy by Dakota Fanning and some other "evil corporation" type vampires.  She does, and they go back home to Forks, where Edward asks Bella to marry him.  And that's New Moon in an incredibly lame nutshell.

Geez, Twilight and New Moon sound even more ridiculous than I realized.

Well, our viewing group had a great time with these two.  Try watching Twilight and New Moon imagining that Bella smells really, really bad.  Just try it.  And boy did we have a field day when Edward, who can read other peoples' thoughts, can't read Bella's ("It's because she doesn't have any!" we'd yell at the screen, though of course Edward couldn't hear our thoughts, either).  Vampires are really fast, but the "speedy running" special effects, as one girl put it, made Edward look more like Sonic the Hedgehog.  And don't even get me started on the fact that sunshine doesn't kill vampires; it just makes them sparkly.  Or the other fact that werewolves don't require a full moon to transform, but they tend to when angry (HULK HOWL AT MOON!!!)  What made this so much better was that, as I mentioned, the whole group sans me was female.  It wasn't that the plot was so bad for Twilight and New Moon - I mean, they're no Hunger Games, but I've seen far worse - it's just that they are truly terrible movies.  After we watched Twilight, my wife claimed that it was the worst movie she's ever seen in her life.  I reminded her that we watched Dune (1984) last year, so she rightfully amended her statement to being the "second-worst movie I've ever seen".  The plot could have been anything, but the actors were so incompetent and the direction so worthless that it just didn't matter.  You know it's bad when Bella's dad, who's only in a handful of scenes, was voted "most (and possibly only) endearing character" by us.

So our hopes were low for Eclipse, as you can imagine.  Alamo Drafhouse's pregame show was mostly full of spoofs, like an SNL digital short involving a girl falling in love with one of the "Franks", a family of violent, green people with zippers across their foreheads, and a Jersey Shore spoof that was just plain stupid but generally involved guys with sparkly abs.  The Drafthouse also showed several documentary clips of people who actually do live in Forks and what their lives are like now that the books are so popular.  The mailman keeps mail sent to Bella and Edward for tourists to see.  The general store occasionally intercoms for "Bella Swan" to come to, say, the kayak department (or wherever a sale is going on).  The high school principal receives emails from "parents" explaining that Edward isn't feeling well and won't make it to school today.  They were really quite good-natured about it, and I was glad to see that so many of them coped so well.  My favorite story was from this elderly Native American guy who was eating at the diner and noticed a young girl staring at him.  After he finished eating, he walked over to her and introduced himself as Jacob's grandfather (he even knew the character's name).  Totally made her day, and his eyes lit up as he told the story.  Very cute.

From the get-go, we knew that Eclipse was a different beast altogether.  While the book is told purely from Bella's point of view, the movie borrows scenes from Stephanie Meyer's new book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, to explain visually what the villains are up to, and it works pretty well.  What shocked me about Eclipse, and what made it actually bearable (and in fact, enjoyable) to watch, was that the characters outside of the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle actually got screen-time this time around.  The new director (David Slade, bless him) managed to craft an interesting, suspenseful film.  The back-stories of some of the other Cullen vampires are revealed, and frankly, ALL of the characters are more interesting than Bella.  I'm beginning to suspect that her atrocious acting is mostly her fault but is also at least partially due to the lame character.  Bella works alright as a narrator for the books, but you just can't make a film and expect it to have the same internal depth of character that its source material has.  It doesn't work.  That's why the 1984 Dune movie is the worst film that my wife and I have ever seen: Dune the book is even MORE internal than the relationship-fest of the Twilight Saga.  Anyway, this movie proved that the other actors (the Cullen vampires, the werewolves) really do have some acting talent in them.  Jackson Rathbone in particular stood out as Jasper, who had all of maybe two lines in the first two movies combined.  He gets quite a bit of screen-time in Eclipse, and the movie is all the better for it.  Also, the new director must have hired a new makeup department, because the vampires finally look like they didn't just step out of kabuki theater.  I know it's a random thing to notice, but it's true: the vampires looked less fake and more what I would think a natural vampire really would look like.  I hate myself a little bit for writing that.  Damn you first two movies.  Damn you.

Really all that you need to know about Eclipse's plot is that someone in Seattle is forming an army of newly-made vampires - called "newborns" - and plans on hunting down the Cullens in Forks.  The Cullens, therefore, team up with their hated enemies, the werewolves, in order to fight back.  Meanwhile, Bella has chosen Edward but tries to maintain a friendly relationship with Jacob even though she loves him, too.  Their triangle wasn't nearly as annoying as it had been in the previous two films, but it was still an annoying weakpoint here (with the exception of one scene involving a tent, which I thought was hilarious).  As I guy, I find Bella very difficult to love, but since she is Stephanie Meyer writing herself into her books, naturally these two fire-and-ice suitors fall all over her.  I think that's why Eclipse was actually a good movie: it would have worked as a fantasy film if Bella's character didn't even exist.  Just cut out the love triangle.  Evil vampires are going to attack a small enclave of non-human-eating vampires?  Sure, sounds fun!

We all left the theater in shock.  Like, jaws-on-the-floor shocked, weakly muttering "I can't believe that was actually a good movie..." in the same way that people probably left the theater of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back muttering "I can't believe that Darth Vader is Luke's father..."  I can't pinpoint exactly what it was; I think it's just that so many little things that went wrong in the first two movies suddenly went right in this one.  I understand that the Twilight filmmakers are taking a leaf from Harry Potter's (far superior) book and are making Breaking Dawn, the final book in the series, into two movies, and all I can say is that I hope they keep the same director.  And Ashley Greene.

No matter what the movie did, though, I could not stop giggling whenever they talked about the "newborn army".  They were very careful to explain what a newborn was in this context, sure, but still my mind decided to visualize an army of screaming babies armed with, say, teething rings and pacifiers, and David Wenham narrating lines from 300 about how "terrible in battle" this deadly army was.