Review of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011) by Kenneth B — 19 Oct 2012

Twilight has to be one of the most frustrating franchises to hit the big screen in recent memory. It continually flatters to deceive. For the final novel they have done the thing that seems to be becoming standard, they have split the novel into two films. There is no way I can accept that there is any artistic motivation for this kind of decision, it's just so they can prolong the life of the franchise and essentially rip off all the kids who made the films and the books successful in the first place. If there were any doubt about this the tepid opening 45 minutes which contains a wedding and a honeymoon, with little else, highlights just how much padding there is in this film. I say 'film', it certainly cant stand alone, it's back to the 'made-for-TV' feel that I had a problem with in the previous installments. In fact at the 45 minute mark there is a montage which could well be followed by an announcer telling us what we can see next week on Twilight, seriously it's after the cut from Bella and Edward to Jacob and his pack of wolves.

The second half of the film does indeed promise to deliver and offer some kind of reward for the less enthusiastic amongst us. There is a reasonably effective body-horror segment although it is distorted, almost certainly so it can pass at 12a (or PG-13). If this wasn't a film aimed at a younger audience then maybe they would show us something a bit more Cronenbergian but we're back to that money thing again! Then when the action scenes to arrive and we see werewolves and vampires going at it, we can actually barely see anything. The CGI on the wolves suddenly is very poorly rendered, they blur as they leap and tussle so we cant really see what is happening. It's hard to tell whether it is just poor production of whether it is done, once again, to dilute the on screen violence. Normally with recent films my complaint is with the camera movement, that isn't as much of an issue here, it is the computer effects that take away from the spectacle.

On the plus side this film does actually present the characters with some interesting dilemmas. This is as fleshed out as the characters have been but ultimately it is still unsatisfactory as a drama. Robert Pattinson was impressive in the recent Cosmopolis, however this could be partly down to David Cronenberg's direction and superior writing. In Breaking Dawn Part 1 he is the same mumbling charisma void that he was in the earlier Twilight films. Kristen Stewart is satisfactory at best and Taylor Lautner serves his purpose but does little more than that.

Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is a predominantly mundane film, still bogged down by the soap opera romance, which is still tedious, and too often it squanders interesting premises. It is languid in its approach, in truth there is a wedding, a honeymoon, a birth and one other thing right at the end which would be a spoiler so I wont be specific but not much else that happens aside from some interspecies bickering. It is probably still the strongest of the four films so far, although that isn't really saying much.