Blake Howard sinks his teeth into The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1…
So I’m not going to bother reviewing Twilight for fear of measuring it in the standard that I’m normally used to, that is to say – as a FILM and not a phenomenon. I’m mainly going to compare it with comparable televisual texts and attempt to grade it according to this now emerged vamp / wolf genre. So I’ll just share my key learnings with you after seeing (and thankfully not paying for – bless you Dale Sinden) The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1…
1. If one receives a wedding invite to one’s best friend’s wedding (that one is also in love with) in the post, one must immediately take their shirt off and run into the woods.
2. The werewolves in this film have caught the ‘Banner’ syndrome – meaning that when they transform into giant wolves, their metamorphosis back to their human form allows them to keep their clothes. I was under the impression that the previous film established that they lose their gear? Anyway.
3. A werewolf’s hot blood always makes him look like he wants to ravage your human bride if you’re a vampire. I would not let that 8-pack mofo touch my lady for fear of him stealing her.
4. Humans marrying vampires are calculating mofos. Bella clearly has gone, ‘well Edward will always look the same and Jacob will eventually look like his dad’.
5. If you see a cutaway to a person / character that you’ve never seen before in an important scene, it is most certainly the author of the series who is now producing the film.
6. Don’t try and crow bar in an evil back story for the vampire lover so late in the piece (please see ‘Passion’ – Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2 for a lesson); especially when it’s just another bullshit Edward is so mind numbingly perfect fucking blah blah fart blah. I will also make special mention to Eric from True Blood, whose Viking origins and progressive war mongering throughout human history as an awesome and fascinating story that arcs over a number of episodes / series.
7. If you were hoping that there would be some debauchery in this ‘Book of Mormon’ repressed as shit series; STOP! The sex scenes between Edward and Bella in this $137 Million dollar blockbuster don’t come anywhere near the gold standard of True Blood – or even the silver standard of the ‘mucho-controversial’ Season 6 Buffy and Spike fling. Edward is all like ‘I don’t wanna hurt you’ and Bella is all like ‘give it too me you friggin pussy’….or something like that. See Kristen Stewart dripping sexuality in Into the Wild as a horny teenager in a far more impressive (if brief) performance.
8. Vampire husbands-to-be get Bears along to their bachelor party. Those boys are very ‘Twinky’ so I wasn’t surprised.
9. Vampire caesareans involve husbands biting the child out of you.
10. Sometimes cinema can project your dreams for you; and in Breaking Dawn Bella’s dream that her and Edward are standing on a pile of corpses that used to be their wedding guests was the most satisfying part of the film for me.
Fortunately for all involved – particularly Stewart (good actress in anything else) and Pattinson (good in Water for Elephants) – Breaking Dawn – Part 1 means that there’s only Part 2 to go before we can move on.
Blake Howard is a writer/site director/podcaster at the castleco-op.com. Follow him on Twitter here: @BLAGatCCO.
Originally published November 23, 2011. Updated April 10, 2018.
