nightlydvdreviewThe Twilight Saga: Eclipse
July 11th 2010 10:02
R-Patz and Stewart frolic amongst the flowers
The marketing juggernaut for Eclipse takes great pains to remind viewers that in this episode of The Twilight Saga “one girl must discover her destiny”. That girl is Isabella Swan, and she’s been treading a well-worn romantic path now for an unnecessarily long time, implicating vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black in her constantly messy and unclever love triangle.
With David Slade at the helm of this instalment, Eclipse was meant to restore the franchise’s energy that had been sucked out by its uniformly hated predecessor New Moon. “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder / Which, as they kiss, consume”. With the brooding voice-over of Bella Swan quoting Shakespeare, audiences were thrust into the atmospheric two-hour-long mope that is New Moon. Slade’s take on Stephanie Meyer’s third book achieves much of the same, if not a more sophisticated flirtation between annoying indecisiveness and embarrassingly obvious predictability. That the film literally ends where it should have begun (if we go by New Moon’s cliff-hanger of “will you marry me?”) validates the overbearingly sluggish narrative.
Little improvement on their acting skills is shown by the Twilight trio, who’ve now all achieved mega stardom. Taylor Lautner’s commitment to his werewolf persona quickly turns silly, while Robert Pattinson is just a bore to watch, plain and simple. Kristen Stewart, who’s often polarised the critics when it comes to her command of acting, finally confirms that she cannot command ongoing interest in her whiny character. It doesn’t help either that the icy mountain top ranges, upon which the complications of the central love triangle intensify, look at once cheesy and cheap.
Slade manages to stay loyal to the book by recapturing the past lives of certain members of the Cullen family. However, the result is strangely jarring. The soundtrack is similarly disappointing and misused, with the only way to integrate Muse’s Neutron Star Collision is by having some peripheral random remarking “Oh...I like this song”. Terrible. Just terrible.
1 STAR
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