I feel totally robbed. And it’s Harry Potter’s fault. Well, really, it’s the fault of the annoying movie producers, who saw the last Harry Potter book split into two films, realised – quite rightly – that the Twilight fanbase would not only spend double the money to see the same amount of story, but be grateful for it, and did the same here. Just as Stephanie Meyer makes the mediocre and clumsy J.K. Rowling look like an expert in prose and character, this made those two dull and turgid films look like masterworks.
I feel robbed. I don’t expect much from Twilight, but I do expect expensive and impressive visuals, silly but fun fights between supernatural beings and lots of absolute absurdity that isn’t meant to be funny, but really, really is. It was particularly bad because though I had otherwise avoided spoilers, I knew that the last book was centred on totally ridiculous nonsense – a vampire gets a human girl pregnant, the baby more or less bursts out of her and kills her, she has to be converted to being a vampire (which frankly should have happened partway through book 1 and only vague handwaving at immortal souls – and in this film, the joy of sex – put it off) and then the werewolf boy actually falls in love with the baby. Surely that’s going to be hilarious, right?
Well, in a unified film of the entire book, most likely it would have been. But the fact was this had to be horribly, horribly drawn-out so that those events were the big climax and cliffhanger here. And almost nothing else happens.
I say that almost nothing else happens, but actually, the book was chock-a-block with hilariously stupid things that would have kept me entertained, as I discovered by reading my favourite blog about Twilight on Sparknotes, always my post-movie treat. I felt robbed anew – cut from the film are such hilarious things as Jacob’s wolf friend Quil going on an date to the beach with his three-year-old girlfriend, the brilliant tale of little vampire infants having to be destroyed by the Volturi and Edward not only randomly giving Bella a Mercedes but hinting he’ll get her another, better car once she’s a vampire. Gloriously stupid, absurd and mercenary. If the filmmakers were really mocking the source material, as Film 2011 suggested they were, this is the stuff that would have stayed in. Instead, they tried to make it as palateable as they could, and the only big laughs were the lovely romantic shots between one muscular wolf-boy and his baby consort and the desperate attempts to make ‘We took René and Esme and put them together to make the lovely baby name Renesmee’ sound reasonable. Though I must say, when the girls who I’ll euphemistically say were very into their ghetto culture in the seats in front of us in the packed cinema said ‘That’s pretty’ [‘Vass pri’ee’] I wasn’t sure how serious they were. ‘Renesmee’ would fit right into that joke video of ‘ghetto names’ like ‘La’Shonte’ or ‘Sha’Tanya’. If Meyer hopes for her own Wendy Darling, I’m fairly sure she’ll fail. And if the next generation has a lot of Renesmees, well, I’ll weep for mankind.
I’ve never been averse to Twilight films, despite all the hatred. I quite liked the first one – not a lot happened, it’s hard to see how anyone but gluttons for punishment like Edward and there were stupid sparkling vampires (which seems all but forgotten in this film, with tropical climates and outdoor weddings, and don’t give me cloudiness totally negating the effect), but it was nice to look at and the story was paced about right. The second film was decent for most of its length until it shot itself in the foot at the end, the third was really dumb but at least not boring, but this? So very, very little happened. It made me long for Potter and Pals sitting about in a tent griping about their situation.
In the amount of time it would take to get the whole film’s plot out of the way, Bella and Edward get married. They go to their private island in Rio, where the obvious thought to have is ‘why don’t the vampires just live there instead of, y’know, right next to werewolf territory?’ as well as ‘Geez, don’t you know you’re going to get covered in mosquito bites if you leave the door open like that in Brazil?’ They have sex, which makes Edward moan because he bruised her a bit. Bella gets pregnant, they’re too far from home and safety for Edward to get Carlisle to turn her into a vampire, and the baby grows ridiculously fast. They go home, the werewolves decide they want to kill everyone now a baby’s on the way, as after all they were just waiting for the right time to attack the vampires anyway (ie when Bella is either dead or a vampire), there’s a total lack of drama or action, and then the baby is born (seducing Jacob with her eyes) and Bella has to be turned. That’s it. Oh, and the incredibly difficult procedure of turning Bella involved giving her an injection and biting her legs a few times.
I’m happy for a Twilight film to be dumb. I don’t mind bad writing or bad acting (though the actors get a bad rap for a pretty decent job and would be praised for equal performances in better-loved properties). I don’t mind total stupidity. But I expected hilarity as vampire babies burst out of bellies and all-out war. The one thing I can’t stand in Twilight is dullness.
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