Twilight Saga: Eclipse - Review

There are no concessions to newcomers in David Slade’s reboot of the woozy, gauzy, sleep-inducing Twilight brand. If you don’t already know who Bella is, why she’s so mopey, and what the deal is between her and the even more mopey, distractingly contact-lensed Edward, well, tough. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is unapologetic fan cinema, a matter of fervour not critical forensics, a chance for self-conscious teenage girls to do a Titanic – that is: use the movies as a ritualistic space for collective emoting.

Adapted by Melissa Rosenberg from the third novel in Stephenie Meyer’s none-more-turgid, vanilla-goth series, Eclipse begins with Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her vampiric himbo of a boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) being pretty and coyly passionate in a meadow. Poetic, too: Bella recites some lines from Robert Frost — “From what I’ve tasted of desire/I hold with those who favour fire.”

She gets a bit more fired up as the film goes along, too. Abstinence be damned. After hemming and hawing for ages – part of the success of Twilight lies in the way it re-romanticises abstinence and True Love Always sentiments for a more blasé, sexualised generation of pre-adults – she’s decided that she’s happy to lose her virginity if it allows her to go over to the side of the undead and spent the rest of eternity coiling herself into coochy-cooch formations with ice-boy Edward.

There are, as is so often the case when one decides to get conjugal with garlic-haters, all sorts of complications. The first is that werewolf-boy Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) – more bronzed than cadaverous Edward, smilier and with less pointy gnashers, a glowing embodiment of quasi-American values (quasi as his Indian background means he’ll never be Nick Jonas) rather than Cullen, who opts for a glum Mittel European mien – has started to up his game as he tries to woo Bella.

Walking around topless, the better for her to admire his rippling torso and twangy nipples, Jacob moves between boasts and promises, endlessly telling the love of his life that he’s The Man for her. All Edward can do for the most part is huff: “Doesn’t he own a shirt?”

An even bigger problem is the arrival in Seattle of a posse of super-tough vampires – “newborns” – on the loose and hungry to slay their older rivals. They’re led by Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard), a flame-haired schemer, manipulator and death-dispenser who’s hell-bent on avenging the slain love of her life. The final face-off, as with all the bloody ruckuses in Twilight, is shot and edited so nervously that it plays as apocalyptically as a youth-club scrap in Byker Grove.

Not that that matters to Slade. This isn’t The Lord of the Rings. What’s really most important is that the characters are given ample time to sigh, moon, swoon and sigh again about the ineffable ineffability of – well, who knows what? An hour could have been sliced from the film’s 120 minutes-plus running time and there still wouldn’t be enough of a plot to grit up the dreariness and dolours that seep across every other scene like ambient oil slick.

It’s tempting to think Spade wants, like Sofia Coppola in The Virgin Suicides, to capture the dreamy indolence of youth; he achieves, at best, the rapture of narcolepsy.

I suppose it’s too late to replace Kristen Stewart. She has her fans who thrill to her gaucheness and to her angst, who think of her as some kind of Jodie Foster in waiting. Others may find her eyebrows dismayingly kempt, her plaid shirts an upsetting reminder of the godawful grunge bands from Seattle in the early Nineties, the words that pass her lips an ear-mangling potage of adolescent puff-puff, therapy speak and Mills and Boon saccharine.

“I’m not normal,” Bella says at one point. Oh, but she is. As normal – and as thrilling to behold – as broken biscuits. Her passivity, her genuflection to a funny-jawed posho like Edward: it’s hard not to bracket Twilight with Sex and the City, two films that both make you want to raise your arms to the heavens and cry out: “Whatever happened to riot grrl? Whatever happened to feminism? Whatever happened to women?”

Rosenberg’s script does its best to inject a note of humour into proceedings. The father-daughter exchanges – he all concern, she all squirm – are good for a knowing chuckle. As is the scene in which Jacob fronts up to Edward and announces: “Let’s face it: I am hotter than you.” It’s true, though what would really have jollied up the film is if the two of them, so better suited for each other than for Bella, had ditched the girl and declared their love for each other.

A vampire and a werewolf? Cross-species homosexuality? I’m sure, somewhere out in internet-land, quite a few Twilight fan-fiction scribblers have already started elaborating on that notion. It’s bound to eclipse Eclipse.

  

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