Grizzly Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

I feel like the entire film industry is beginning to revolve around pop culture. Now, this isn’t anything new, I know, but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t frightening, with franchises that run for anywhere from five years (Twilight Saga) to 50 years (James Bond films). The surprising thing, though, is how much money these franchises make. Franchises like the Harry Potter films are in the multi-billions, as are franchises like Twilight and the James Bond movies.

For our fourth helping of vampire-human-wolf romance, Breaking Dawn opens on a distressed Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) – tearing off his shirt to reveal his abs as he does in every Twilight film – who has just received an invitation to the wedding of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). We then cut to Bella and Edward who are preparing for the festivities, exchanging cringe-worthy, lovey-dovey, pseudo-humorous dialogue that makes you just want to press some kind of magical fast-forward button in the theater.

The wedding scene itself is overdone, as is the rest of the movie. The scene prior is an oddly humorous and equally disturbing nightmare scene that doesn’t juxtapose well with the humorous and joyous status that the wedding scene attempts to achieve. Then comes the 90 minute long honeymoon scene that seems to never end.

If Breaking Dawn achieves one thing, it can be rightfully named the most boring and badly written Twilight movie of all of them, which is really saying something. Jacob is as whiny as ever, Bella is more insecure than ever, and Edward emotes about as much as a Saudi Arabian housewife.

And don’t even get me started on the birth scene. It’s f***ing disgusting. That’s all I have to say about that. Then, when the little half-vamp bastard pops out, she’s disgusting. But what’s even more disgusting is what happens next. Trust me, I couldn’t make this up.

Jacob Black, who’s eternally in love with Bella, sees the baby, and becomes transfixed. The film fades to a flashforward of the child at a much older age. Jacob then imprints her, which in Twi-cabulary, basically means that he’s in love with her until she dies. Thinking of this from a standpoint that doesn’t involve pedophilia, it’s not even that romantic, but with the whole pedophilia aspect added in, it veers off the course from romantic to f***ing disgusting. The movie put such a bad taste in my mouth after that I didn’t even care what happened next, which is convenient, because nothing interesting pops up like it should. If you’re going to split one adaptation into two films, at least make the movies interesting.

The Twilight series is known for having good soundtracks with songs by bands we actually like. Admittedly, the soundtracks are all great, but Breaking Dawn doesn’t even seem to try in this department. Trading in well-crafted rock songs by good bands, for either whiny pop songs or melodramatic, epic, and usually unnecessary pieces of music, in an attempt to maybe keep everyone from drifting off about 45 minutes in to the movie.

Almost everything about The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is overly serious, pretentious, boring, and so full of itself. Even fans of the Twilight series might start falling asleep in the second half. On the bright side, the end credits are designed really well, and they were by far the most exciting part of the movie. Also, I heard that people were having seizures during the birth scene due to the quick flashes of light. I theorize that this is because after 89 minutes of such boring-ass nothingness, the sudden and infrequent (there are honestly about 4 flashes of light in the entire scene. I expected to see like an electrical storm happening in the theater. The credits had more flash than this scene.) flashes of light woke up some viewers to the point of involuntary convulsion. If I had the choice between bad movie and seizure, I’d choose seizure any day.

1/5 Bears

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Images: Summit Entertainment