The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)
Directed by: David Slade
Written by: Melissa Rosenberg, Stephenie Meyer
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner
Riley Biers is attacked by the evil Victoria, who wants to create an army of ‘newborns’ set to destroy Bella. Meanwhile back in Forks, Edward wants to marry Bella and only wants to vampirise her after, but Bella is not redy to wed. After the ‘changed’ Riley appears in Bella’s room, she feels safer with Jacob and the other werewolves, until Jacob confesses his love for her and forcefully kisses her. It seems that only an alliance between the werewolves and the vampires will be able to stop the newborn army, but this doesn’t seem possible, especially as Edward and Jacob are becoming enemies over Bella……….
After the utter tedium of New Moon, there was only one way the Twilight saga could go and that was up, and indeed Eclipse is a little better than its immediate predecessor, but that’s like saying having your ear cut is better than having your eye gouged out; both will cause you considerable pain, damage and may ruin your life. Despite having a director in David Slade who attempts to give the movie some tension [something Twilight had little of and New Moon lacked totally] and even some atmosphere in some scenes, it still winds up being more of the same boring, stupid rubbish. This is certainly darker then the first two films, and actually shows a fair amount of vampiric activity for once. There’s even some very brief gore including a decapitation, and a bit more action, but sadly Slade decided to shoot much of this with the obligatory swirling camerawork and spastic editing. It just gave me sore eyes, and I’ m really fed up with getting sore eyes trying to watch an action scene. Also things seem to be building up to a big battle that ends up being over far too quickly. Perhaps the best scenes are some surprisingly intense flashbacks, though they’re maybe too brief. The film really suffer though whenever it concentrates on the main love triangle, which is about two thirds of it, right down to the pathetic confrontations between the two male leads. The dialogue is atrocious and the performances borderline inept. Robert Pattinson [who, along with his cohorts, is a lot less pale this time for some reason] is required to emote a fair bit in this one, rather than just stare at Kristen Stewart looking constipated, and is simply not up to the task, while Taylor Lautner’s problem may not be that he’s a werewolf but that he’s made of wood, so bland is he. Stewart seems to be getting worse each movie, and the film also commits the cardinal sin of making Bryce Dallas Howard unattractive! Worse then all this though is that never does anyone convince of being really in love, of having this obsessive passion; it’s all just so ridiculously muted, repetitive and dull. I found it impossible to get involved or to care, but thousands of people do, so I must just assume they are watching different films to me.
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