The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1

If you're a big time fan of the books, you have probably hyped yourself up to a fevered expectation rendering you incapable of any objectivity. This film, of it's own merit, would have never made it to the theaters. In a word, it is very "boring"... unless your hyped, it bites! (pun intended). Many of the scenes were obvious fillers with terrible dialogue. The acting was so-so from most of the lead performers, with the sole exception being Billy Burke (Charlie), who appears to be a very good actor. About half way through the film I kept looking at my watch hoping the 117 minutes would be over soon.

I am being forced at this point to continue writing when in fact I have nothing more to say about this boring sequel of a film called Breaking Dawn. According to the rules ones' review must be at least 10 lines minimum. So what you're reading right now is the completely unnecessary and unpleasantly annoying filler, mandated by IMDb.

The movie is not to the level of expectation. Although, the book is better, it is hard to represent everything in visual. The worst part of the movie is releasing it as two parts. Anyway let bygones be bygones. The performance of Kristen is fantastic. But the rest of the team don't support her performance. The nocturnal fight can be made better with little increase in brightness. Twilight series is in the high level of expectation to the people who don't read book. Let us expect some good plot in conclusion.

One famous critic says the following. " Based on a portion of the popular teen romance book "Breaking Dawn" this slow-moving film has long periods of inaction and generates little suspense, making it the worst film in the "Twilight Saga" films so far. This movie seems to be a mere multimillion dollar bookmark, marking time until the overarching story is finally concluded in the last film. Short on plot developments and long on inaction, the characters spend much of the film waiting for something, anything to happen.

This third film in the Twilight Saga opens with the marriage of the human Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) to the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). This is followed by the honeymoon in South America. A good deal of time is spent in transit to and from South America. Although a private jet is involved in this trip, most of the traveling scenes are in cars or limousines. These are awkward sequences where nothing really happens. When the newlyweds finally have sex, the act is underplayed, and not repeated during the honeymoon. Once again, the chastity theme comes to the fore as the husband broods over the safety of his wife and his wife's bruises resulting from his partial loss of self-control during sex.

So the bride and groom are on their honeymoon on a fancy island resort, but they are still waiting for something else to happen, namely the act of turning Bella into an vampire. Why they don't just go ahead and get it over with isn't explained very well. When Bella's other boyfriend, Jacob the werewolf (Taylor Lautner) finds out about this human-vampire honeymoon idea, he thinks it is crazy. While everyone is waiting for Bella to become a vampire, something else happens. Bella becomes pregnant. This, of course, requires more waiting to see what happens with the pregnancy.

After more limo scenes, the bride and groom head back to the family compound in Washington where they spend the rest of the film waiting to find out what happens with the baby. More waiting, more interminable chastity. Just like any marriage. There is a brief flurry of action at the end of the film when another battle between the vampires and werewolves starts to flare up, for no good reason, by the way. During all this, amazingly, nobody bothers to tell Bella's father that she might be dying, or that she has decided to join the undead vampires anyway, even if she survives the birth. Instead, Bella lies to her father, telling him she is at a spa in Switzerland. I guess everyone decides that Bella's father has no right to be at his daughter's side as she fights for her life. This is just heartless and wrong, but it is just one of many wrong things in this twisted story.

I'm not going to go into the film's ending, but almost all of the plot and what little action there is in the film is back loaded into the last few minutes of the film. The film's running time of nearly two hours is overlong. It is more like one hour of plot padded out to two hours. Surprisingly, the one character who undergoes much of a change in the film (until the last second of the film) is Jacob. While most of the characters in the film are passive and childlike, Jacob actually grows up and becomes an adult in the film. He takes a stand against the leader of his wolf pack and starts his own pack. Unfortunately, this doesn't last long. He reverts back to passivity because of something called "imprinting" and once again loses his will. Completing the image of loss of will, he even falls to his knees as if he were worshiping the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.

I get the feeling this film is similar to "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One." It seems to be an artificial creation, manufactured to make an additional $700 million that the studio would not have gotten if they had just made one "Breaking Dawn" film instead of two. If you are going to make movies of a series of books and you plan to make the movies true to the books, then do that. Don't try to manufacture additional movies by splitting a book in two. It doesn't work. At least it hasn't worked with the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises. This film rates a D."

Breaking Dawn has been breaking box office records since its release. Sadly though, I really can't see why.

Aside from the importance of the wedding to be shown, and the last 30 minutes of it that "saved-the-bell", this movie is boring.

The only thing about the movie that I liked is the fact that, in this installment, Jacob Black owned Edward Cullen.

Not being a fan of the series, the book, nor the story, should make me expect less.

However, that is not a reason for this, or any film to be made this bad.

There is not much happening altogether in this film. They put way too much focus on the wedding and the honeymoon, thus wasting precious time. But I guess all those teenage girl fans wanted a full portrayal of the big romantic wedding.

In all of the previous films, I liked the acting of most of the cast a lot. But in this film, everyone except Bella, Edward & Jacob is marginalised to such an extent that there cannot be much said about them. As an audience you just don't get to see enough of any of them to really develop a connection with or care about them.

Altogether this is an OK addition to the franchise, by no means worse than the disappointing/confusing 2nd or 3rd films. I assume I will give this film either a 5 or a 6 (out of 10), but I think I will withhold my final vote until I have seen part 2. I know some might say that they are released as separate films and therefore should be treated as such, but as the original book is ripped into two halves here, I think it is fair to reserve the final judgement until I have seen the two films in conjunction (seeing that, as I haven't read the books, I will need to have seen both films in order to make sense of it all).

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

The fourth film in the mega-popular series has Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) getting married and shortly afterwards the female virgin becomes pregnant, which could cause her death, which doesn't sit too well with werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Obviously a 32-year-old male isn't the target viewer for this film but I must admit that it was a major step up from the previous two installments. I might even go as far to say that this here was the best of the series in a bad way. I say that because I'm sure teenage girls will be weeping all over themselves through the first hour of this thing but, as an adult, I couldn't help but laugh at it. The first hour deals with the screen's most popular duo getting married and of course the girl losing her virginity. I know this is a big thing to Twi-hards and teenage girls but the execution here is just laughable and especially the moments leading up to the act. The entire thing is just directed so over-dramatic that I couldn't help but laugh. It also didn't help that the dialogue was just downright awful and at times embarrassing. With that said, these bad moments actually make the film rather entertaining. Both Pattinson and Stewart are pros at these characters by now and it's also clear that Lautner continues to work out and this must cause him to skip his acting classes. As usual the CGI is pretty bad but I guess this is to be expected. Still, I found the story to be rather compelling and the entire thing kept me entertained from start to finish. Yes it drags on too long but you have to admit there's some pretty weird stuff going on here and especially during the second half.