Twilight Eclipse - movie review
By Paul Verhoeven and Luke 'Jacob' Ryan

We went to the midnight screening, which meant that fatigue was another ingredient stirred into the stew of fear we'd been imbibing for the preceding days, but there was a certain morbid fascination for us; both of us have read portions of the books and have obviously been subjected to the same carpet-bombing of previews and imagery from the movies, but otherwise we're pretty much new to this franchise. So how does Eclipse fare for the casual, uninitiated cinema goer? Let's dive in. You might want to bring a snorkel and some rage-suppressants.

First up, a word of warning. If you have no idea about the general narrative structure of the series than beware, because the film makes absolutely no effort whatsoever to explain the various events that have led to this point. In fact, the dialogue as a whole is generally so banal and flavourless that they almost go to lengths not to mention the events that have led to this point. By 45 minutes in I would have killed Bella and everyone she cared about if I thought it was going to get me a keyword. You don't really get any firm grip on what is happening until half way in, at which point you face the sinking realisation that evidently in the first two films, much like the one you're currently watching, almost nothing of consequence actually happened. Unpicking the threads of the plot is like taking part in an Amazing Race-scale scavenger hunt only to discover that the prize at the end is a marathon listening session to Kamal's entire back catalogue. But let's have a crack, shall we?  

Part of the facile anathema of Twilight: Eclipse is Bella. You might assume that as the heroine of Twilight she possesses some unique qualities .I'm not talking about the uniqueness we're repeatedly told about, I'm talking about qualities you actually fucking see. You know, in practice. You'd be spectacularly wrong, though. She's a vehicle. A husk; a dry, tope envelope; a hessian sack into which anyone (typically young girls) can slot themselves without having to worry about contending with any differences between their personality and Bella's; you can't have a difference of opinions if your conduit is incapable of having any. Regardless, we're stuck with Bella as the eyes through which we see this insipid universe and all its misty opulence, so whether or not you see Eclipse under duress, you're going to have to try and see things from her point of view. This wouldn't be a particularly pressing problem, if it weren't for the fact that at the start of the film, Bella is evidently in some sort of vague danger; apparently the Volturi, a terrifying bunch of mystic vampiric douchebags dripping in crinoline and chintz, and looking not entirely unlike a New Romantics cover band, have decreed that Bella and Edward getting together is an altogether bad idea. At least I think they decreed it; at one point they stood on a rooftop and muttered some asinine bullshit about sneaking around and waiting, or possibly not waiting and being less sneaky about things and stuff. But you definitely got a bad vibe from them. I mean, It would have been nice if there'd been some goddamned exposition, or some kind of recap for people who'd stupidly volunteered to watch this piece of shit when they could have been at home sleeping and having awesome dreams where they're both riding oily unicorns together, but I guess the idea of scripting something so that things are made clearer for newcomers is about as familiar to the people who made this atrocity as the concept of bathing is to YOUR MOTHER. 

Sorry. This really took its toll on us.  

Here, however, is the pressing narrative quandary, not just of Eclipse but the entire saga. Apart from the fact that we're told she's amazing, why are two armies of reasonably engaging and sated characters willing to die fighting the Volturi over her? On the one hand, you have Edward and the Cullen clan of vampires. They appear to have close friends, have conquered their animistic urge to feed off humans, live in a totally sweet house and got bitten when they were young and attractive, so they don't ever have to contend with anything particularly unpleasant. Apart from Bella, of course. Even the vampire who got bitten during the American civil war has miraculously straight teeth, which is odd considering that most strapping young men from that era had theirs replaced with wood due to the rampant mouth disease. Vampires also appear to be made from porcelain/ice/glass/chalk, which to my mind does not make them the most sexually vital beings one could imagine. Especially if, like us, you had your nipples surgically replaced with diamonds.  

Then you have Jacob. Jacob is a werewolf who seems to counteract the inherent hirsuteness of the species by ensuring that his human form has had every skerrick of hair waxed off from the eyebrows down. How do you know? Because Jacob spends most of his human-time in the film shirtless, hanging out with an entourage of like-mindedly shirtless frat-wolves. Oh, and they're Native Americans. One can only think that if the real Native Americans were in fact werewolves, the whole brutal colonisation thing may have been a bit harder to pull off. Of course they're hanging around sans shirts because of the whole shape-shifting thing, but let's be frank, if that's the justification then they really should go pantless, too. Unless those Hulk-esque denim cutoffs are the lycanthropic equivalent of being a never-nude. Or maybe werewolves have spent centuries perfecting denim which bursts into spores when you transform into a fucking one-tonne wolf, cling to your fur, then coalesce back into a piece of fashion that even Screech from Saved By The Bell would have trouble looking stupider in. Oh, look! A wolf just escaped through a tailoring plothole! Let's follow it! Let's ignore the whole pants thing for a moment, though, and get back to the life the werewolves lead. They, much like the Cullens, have things downpat. Apart from the occasional psychically shared marital shitstorm, they live in the woods, hunt, hang out with friends... hell, they even get to drive trucks and motorbikes and go to high school. In fact, so do the vampires! They're all hanging out at graduation, going to parties, meeting each others families... so if things are working so well, why are they willing to die at the hands of a red-eyed group of Dan Brown grade cultists and their nonsensical masonic bullshit? Because YOU'RE BELLA. AND THESE CHARACTERS EXIST ONLY TO FAWN OVER, DIE OVER AND BOUND AROUND IN CUTOFFS FOR YOU.  

Ostensibly, everyone is willing to die for Bella. We're not sure why, other than the fact that Stephanie Meyer is a certifiable literary moron, but let's just assume she's awesome. Now what? Well, now a pack of newly and crudely converted vampires have been given Bella's scent and are about to embark on a rape-and-pillage style roadtrip to Forks, the town where our heroes reside. Edward and Bella, after the events of the previous film, are lying in a field, all sparkles and bullshit, contending with the idea of a) having potentially brutal sex with someone who might get carried away and rip your arms off, and b) getting married to someone who, during some potentially brutal sex, might get carried away and rip your arms off. But they're young (well, she is; he's hundreds of years old), so we can overlook the bubbly viscous discharge oozing out of this wound in the pocked skin of cinema. Jacob is off with his pack, sulking about the clearly brain-shittingly awesome Bella. So once the perfunctory "she's mine! No, she's mine!" quandary is digested, both parties resolve to protect Bella. During their single highly formative training session, they continually talk about how quite a few of them are going to die in a bloodbath when the young, angry and surprisingly complaint newbloods arrive, but at no point does anyone (even the hulking, molesty jock vampire) think to say, hey, is this personality vacuum really worth being exploded into a fine paste? It's like the characters are seeing, engaging with and fighting for a character who only they can see; like some vengeful god has erased this beautiful, engaging, dynamic person who resides at the heart of a magical, emotional cosmic shitstorm of formative events, and replaced her with one of those boats that float over coral reefs with the glass floor in them, through which young girls being brainwashed by vapid nonsense or brainless, emotionless shills with cheese addiction issues can ogle at people fighting for something that they didn't fucking earn. Somewhere, the real Bella, the Bella that Edward and Jacob are actually perceiving and fighting for, is floating in a void. Dangling nightmarishly in front of a Being John Malkovich-style screen through which she can see this expressionless, soulless and undeserving stand-in living her life, whilst those who fight for her seem oblivious. It's like all of my worst nightmares about abandonment, helplessness and direction have been rolled into a ball, force-fed to a goat, shat out by the goat and set on fire. By the goat.  

And, while all this is happening can we please, once again keep in mind that the character talking so readily and excitedly about getting married is probably 17. Yep. They marry them young in Colorado. What a role model.  

So, those are the narrative objections. Whew. But cinema is nothing if not filled with shining examples of films that while narratively lacking still succeed in being quite mind-blowingly awesome. Barbarella leaps to mind. Well, I'll save you the suspense, because if Twilight: Eclipse is a "good film" then I am a children's entertainer named "Captain Bombast the Hairy Clown". And it's been at least three years since the authorities cracked down on that one. You could only wish that they might do the same for this franchise. The primary problem is that, in spite of the reams of narrative discussion above, this is a film that at its base is composed of a quite fundamental boredom. At least Sex and the City 2 cycled through moments of grandiose offence at such pace that you could spend the entire film clenched up in a rictus of vibrant anger. Eclipse on the other hand just wafts through unconvincing scene after unconvincing scene where these three personality-less skin sacks gaze into one another's eyes and repeat dialogue that you could have sworn was used verbatim by different characters 20 minutes ago and with a similar lack of conviction. If they spent longer than a single weekend writing this interminable mess of clichés and winsome looks than it could only reflect poorly on the capacities of the writing team. I, personally, would be surprised if on countback there were more than 200 separate words in the film. "Thesaurus" wasn't one of them. The word "love", especially, is used with such reckless profligacy that the characters may as well be describing the contents of a box of Cadbury's Roses. As a result, there are romantic moments in this film of such intense banality that even a mid-range Mills and Boon editor might well blanche in discomfort. I certainly did. And believe me, as someone who once took a girl to see Requiem for a Dream on Valentine's Day, I know a thing or two about romance.  

But, really, it's that lack of chemistry and conviction and anything that might resemble charisma which makes you truly notice the fact that this film is 130 brutal, unnecessary minutes long. The director, David Slade, seems to have made a stylistic choice to match his cinematic style to the plodding pace of the source material so that 95% of the film inches along like sedimentary rock, while the remaining 5% is made up of action scenes that have been cut together in such an artless way that it's impossible to know what's going on and why you should care. And to me it's the latter of those that really grates, because, at its heart, Eclipse is a film that doesn't make any effort whatsoever to prompt an original investment in the viewer. It simply presupposes that everyone who sees it will already be so blinded by adoration for the franchise as a whole that they'll accept these two turgid hours without question or objection. And they do. But for everyone else who perhaps hasn't clad their bedrooms sideboard to ceiling in Team Edward/Jacob memorabilia the film simply represents an abject nothing, an endlessly long and dreary cinematic excursion that serves as an all too obvious metaphor for the frigid and immortal lifelessness of its main characters.  

Of course, the general vibe amongst the crowd as soon as we stepped out of the theatre was "OH MY SHITTING GOD THAT WAS BETTER THAN BEING LUBED UP IN BUTTER AND GOING HEAD FIRST DOWN A SUPER FUN HAPPY SLIDE INTO A POOL FILLED WITH PUPPIES", so perhaps we just weren't made for Twilight. Or perhaps we were. Perhaps we're just denying our innate desire to choose between two perfect men whilst living in a town populated entirely by hot people and fir trees.

Twilight Eclipse is out now on general release.