Images Courtesy of Andrew Cooper, SMPSP © 2011 Summit Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.
I didn’t know if I was going to commit to the end, if I can be frank. My love affair with Twilight started long before Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart came into the picture. I fell for the characters on the page in 2008. In one week I burned through Stephanie Meyer’s three books. Once I heard about the movie version, I couldn’t wait. But, as with all book adaptations, there are large shoes to fill when taking the leap from page to screen. I could never put the books down, but I could have easily walked out of last year’s release, “Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part One.” I get it, where there are dollar signs, studios tend to drag stories on that are meant to be told in two or even three films rather than four. But while the screaming tweens are fine with watching two hours of Stewart staring into Pattinson’s eyes, I am not. The last film left me a tainted fan, wishing I hadn’t seen the movie in the first place. Luckily for me, Part Two exceeded my greatest expectations. All’s well that ends well in this vampire love story.
I left the theater breathing a sigh of relief. My admiration for Meyer’s characters have been restored. Whatever screenwriter, Melissa Rosenberg and director, Bill Condon did this time around worked. Granted, the final part of Breaking Dawn is much more entertaining than the honeymoon phase. For Part Two, I was enticed from the very first opening credit. The cinematography was more mature with its True Blood’ish intro. Flowing blood leads to a shot of red eyes. Bella Swan is a vampire. I don’t know if it’s the newfound strength of her character or the vastly improved dialogue, but Kristen Stewart’s acting stood out. Not because of her incessant lip biting, but because she was sure of herself; delivering a much better performance than in the last three films. Perhaps it took three tries for the entire main cast to get comfortable in their character’s shoes; that goes for both Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, who still seem to brood better than doing anything else. Their supporting cast were the ones responsible for many of the film’s entertaining moments. Michael Sheen’s evil cackle as Aro, the leading Volturi vampire is a scene stealer and Lee Pace does a standout job as Garrett, the class clown of vampires. This is all thanks to a script with more wit and less unnecessary silence. Throughout the film there is always a sense of suspense. Will Bella lose control and suck the blood of her human father? Or will some vampire rip the head off of another?
All action aside, at the end of the day, Twilight has always been a love story. It’s about how far one will go for their true love. For Bella Swan, she’d sacrifice her human life to drink blood for eternity. All of the staring into each other’s eyes and cheesy lines have lead to this. Bella is now fully initiated into the Cullen family as Edward’s vampire wife. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes two vampires with an extraordinary half human-vampire baby. Still in their honeymoon phase, the couple find themselves with a daughter, Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy) who grows at an abnormally rapid pace. Now, Jacob has fallen out of love with Bella and into love with Renesmee. That’s right; he desires the baby thanks to a werewolf tradition called ‘imprinting.’ Once a wolf imprints on their soul mate, you are claimed and belong to them. That little subplot lends a few funny lines throughout. Just as life seems picture perfect, the baby news doesn’t sit well with the almighty Volturi Vampires of Italy. As the ‘end-all, be-all’ of vampire do’s and don’ts, the Volturi are misled to believe that Bella and Edward have created an immortal child; an illegal doing according to vamp guidelines. And so the war begins as the Cullen’s call upon their fellow vampires around the globe to pose as witnesses to their innocence.
Breaking Dawn Part Two is by far the best film of the entire franchise. There is always something that reader’s of the book expect and yearn for in the movie version, but somehow our hopes are rarely fulfilled. I think anyone who read the series will be satisfied in the end. This one is for the diehard Twilight fans.
By Pamela Price
