A Saga Crepúsculo: Amanhecer - Parte 1

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 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."

Victoria is dead, there is no longer any threat to Bella. So she and Edward get married, while on their honeymoon they do the dirty deed and oops, Bella gets pregnant. Vampire pregnant, which means the fetus is growing at 5 times the normal rate and is killing her from within. The wolf clan cannot have this, as it breaks their treaty somehow and they come to kill the baby. Now Jacob must team up with the people he hates, the Cullens, in order to protect Bella.

While this premise does sound interesting, it's a shame that the producers wanted to milk this poorly conceived franchise for every penny they can get. Instead of making one film, they split the story into two and Breaking Dawn Part 1 clearly suffers from over stuffing and filler. Nothing happens until the last twenty minutes of the film. We know they get married, we know they have sex and we know she gets pregnant. It takes way too long to get these plot points across. The wedding, the honeymoon and the pregnancy could have all happened in the first 30 minutes, but it's instead stretched to an obscene length.

Books have more room to breath. The world is created an the writer has hundreds of pages to tell their story. Films don't have this luxury, so when a film comes out based on a book, you need to chop out the stuff that's simply not needed or wouldn't translate well to the screen. Since the people behind this film want to make more money, they split the last film into two. WB did the same for Harry Potter, but I can forgive them because there is actual story to tell in that film, here there is nothing. She doesn't get pregnant until 50 minutes into the film. Which means we are stuck with boring characters either being jealous of what others have (Jacob) or two people having sex over and over (Edward/Bella). The amount of time that was dedicated to the honeymoon is insane. What should have been a ten minute sequence, at most, takes about 30 minutes of screen time.

Once Bella starts dying, the film tries to get into motion, but it's too late. When she goes into labor, that's when something finally interesting happens and the rest of the film makes for some of the most thrilling moments in the entire series. A standoff between the Cullens and the wolves is finally shown here, something that people have been waiting for since the first film. The tension between the two families finally explodes. This is exciting stuff, this is what people have been waiting for, but the film still suffers from bad CGI work when humans interact with the wolves. So the fight sequences, as exciting as they are, never really reach their full potential.

The final frame of the film is so obvious half way through that I actually chuckled to myself when it happened. I still can't shake the feeling that the conflict of the whole series finished with Eclipse and what we have left is an overstretched denouement. Am I excited for the next film? Not really. Half the job of Part 1 is to get you excited for the next, this film fails horribly at that. What's left to happen? An after the credits sequences is shown where we are given a glimpse of what to expect, but I'm too far drawn away from the conflict by that point.

Breaking Dawn is not the worst in the series, but clearly not the best. Had the film been one piece instead of two, then it would have been exciting. The simple fact that it drags on for so long is proof that splitting the film in two was a mistake, creatively. Financially, it's smart. Because young teenage girls will flock to anything, case in point -- this entire series.

The Bella of the ball has gone and dropped it, now she's ballooning, and it looks as if she might split, is she carrying a curse, that will smash the dream and burst, or will the wounds reseal, re-knit and close the slit.

It's a shame they didn't turn it into three, two hour films of nothing much would be such glee, we could watch them painting walls, watch them dry, then watch leaves fall, while under moonlight watch them swimming in the sea.

Breaking Yawn!

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.