Unfortunately, the principle villains, the Volturi, appear to have abandoned their classy, marble-lined Tuscan mausoleum for a Frankenstein-style medieval dungeon with wooden thrones. Stick around for the closing credits or you miss the ‘Easter egg’ scene. The shining light is Kristen Stewart, making the transition from gawky teen, to bride, to expectant mother, the strong but naive teen turning into a fierce creature to give Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens a lesson in maternal determination.Īll this feels like the difficult middle chapter of a trilogy, all the time signalling in advance, down to the very closing shot, the point where we’re halting until next year. Robert Pattinson displays a little more light and shade, despite having a fairly thankless role in all this. As for the rest, Billy Burke is ever reliable as Bella’s father, both dour and comic. Jacob gets a pivotal role at the climax and just about pulls it off. The soundtrack variously clatters in and out with re-treads of Carter Burwell’s original score or some truly dire indie-pop to try to compensate. The dialog is for the most part risible and false, with the actors struggling in scene after scene. The fight scenes with the vampires are jump-cut nonsense with no sense of peril. The scene where there’s a telepathic conversation voiced-over in English between the wolves brought a chuckle to the screening. The wolves seem to have gotten worse since Twilight Eclipse, reduced to weightless, blurry, cartoon cut-outs in long shot, or to snarling, gurning cartoon cut-outs everywhere else. Pretty boy Taylor Lautner acquits himself rather better this time around, having gained some acting weight if only the same could be said of his wolf alter-ego – despite the double blow to biology the werewolves not only transmute but but on about three times the body mass of their human half. Inter-cut is the rather tedious strand concerning werewolf Jacob and his clan, bitterly divided over the baby vampires cannot be allowed to breed, according to the ‘Treaty’.
The unseen Cullen foetus is one step short of Rosemary’s Baby and the birthing scene had my young lady face-in-hands.
BREAKING DAWN PART 1 SOUNDTRACK ARTWORK MOVIE
On the difficult subject of teen sex, Twilight is no longer an abstinence movie, but what we get is one of the best ads against teen pregnancy in a while.ĭirector Bill Condon ( Gods and Monsters) understands the full cultural history of horror movies and is regarded as a safe pair of hands, but even so struggles to keep the movie within the bounds of its’ rating unable to do the full R-rated David Cronenburg body horror, we’re dangerously close with buckets of blood, full on vampire bite wounds and a degraded corpse. We’re soon voyeurs to a very sexually-charged wedding night that just about made it past the censors in context of the rest of the series. Although it’s all undercut by the most ridiculous-looking set of ‘vamps’ (guests and regulars) to give you the giggles. We’re getting into grown-up territory at last. It begins well enough with the long awaited Cullen wedding a terrified bride, an unholy mix of human and vampire guests, the most embarrassing set of wedding speeches in a very long time but even here Breaking Dawn – Part 1 departs the angsty teen vampire tone of its predecessors. In order to spread the most material over two movies, we get part one which is uneven, slow and… err, laboured(!).
Of course you have to get past the genre tag and the target demographic, for which I am the wrong gender and decades too long in the… ah… tooth?īreaking Dawn – Part 1 walks a tight-rope of tones, styles and content and frequently falls off without a safety net. While I find Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling source books poorly written, teen-junk-lit, I have a modest regard for the improving movie series. The backlash has been severe against this instalment, polarising opinion into the lovers and haters. It was my young lady’s birthday the week of release, she is a Twiglet fan, so we went. In The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (catchy title, that), Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) must deal with the consequences of marriage, honeymoon and the impossible, dangerous birth of a child all made worse for Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) in his divided loyalties to Bella versus his allegiance to the werewolf clan.