Twilight: Breaking Dawn part 2

I don’t think I really need to complain about the various glaring plot problems in this latest – and hopefully last – Twilight film. About the fact that the film is basically about the Volturi walking across half the world rather than getting a plane, and then just walking back. About what a lazy plot device Alice is. About how Alice could have just shared her plan from the start and prevented several deaths, plus the slaughter of a number of innocents in the vicinity of Forks as a group of vampires gather to protect super-special Bella. About how very annoying Bella is with her perfection and her super powers and yet how she just completely ignores her baby to have some sex for a few days. About how the series ends with the Volturi still in power, still doing whatever they like in Italy including slaughtering what ought to be a notably huge number of people. How Jacob is going to have sex with Renesmee when she’s seven and ‘fully grown’. But again, Dan Bergstein over at Sparknotes has already done all of that in his brilliantly funny readings of the books, and done the suffering for me.

I have to say, having read his summary of the books chapter by chapter, I’m very very glad that he did it so I didn’t have to, and presented it in such an enjoyable way. Plus once again I can find out about the stupider parts of the books – the absurd last-minute change where it turns out werewolves aren’t really werewolves. Marcus’ hilarious power of seeing relationships. The way she tries to write a bit of action at the end, and has some mist buffet against a love bubble and some snow, with the result that everyone is then convinced Bella was the one who won the ‘war’ for them.

So since I don’t feel the need to talk about that, I only feel the need to talk about the big climax, the one scene that makes the film enjoyable, the one scene that isn’t even in the goddamn books – a huge, gristly battle sequence. To be fair, not to have it there would make this an incredibly dull film, almost as dull as Breaking Dawn part 1. Again because the film was padded out to make enough material for two, this one is drawn out to great length, with only a scene with Bella’s father feeling like it brought any depth to any of the characters. But the fact is that the filmmakers put in a long, bloody battle between superpowered vampires, with some huge werewolves thrown in there. And it’s quite satisfying – annoying Cullens are dispatched, wolves rip off the heads of smug vampires and of course, there at the centre of it is Martin Sheen, always the best thing about these films, having a brilliant time with one of the campest roles it’s possible to have and looking both absurd and awesome doing it. It’s basically a comic book film at this point, not the turgid romance it was before, and it’s fantastic. And yes, like most of the parts of Twilight that are actually good, it’s not in the books.

I’ve now seen every one of these films, and I’m pretty saddened by the fact that such awful, awful books were actually enjoyed by a target demographic that – and I don’t care what an intellectual snob I am to say this – have to be morons to actually think is good plotting or romantic in any way. I don’t mind things I think are crap but have the bare minimum of decent writing make it big – like Harry Potter – but for this to sell so very much is quite distressing. That said, the expensive films were with a couple of exceptions at least amusing, fun and I quite genuinely liked the first one, in an ‘it’s not good but it’s nowhere near terrible’ sort of way – I even preferred it to the Harry Potter films. But that was imagining something better had to happen after the first film…and it didn’t. It got worse and worse and oh so much worse. 

Conclusion: Meyer is teeeerrrrrrible but Hollywood can indeed polish turds - to some extent.