The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One began with monotonous wedding preparations.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part Two kicks off with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) in vampire form needing to quench her thirst for blood. This compulsion leads to Swan speeding around the forest, nearly eating some guy Free Solo-ing up a mountain, and eventually viciously attacking a mountain lion for dinner. The shackles are off for director Bill Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg. The first Breaking Dawn movie wielded strong PureFlix vibes. Now, the Sunday school sermon is over. Twilight is going out with a preposterous bang.
Once Bella has done a quick run with her newfound vampire powers, it’s time to focus on Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy), her half-human/half-vampire offspring. The vengeful vampire Irina (Maggie Grace) eventually spies Renesmee and believes she’s a forbidden “immortal child” threatening the vampire world. She reports this development to The Voltouri. Inevitably, the organization’s leader, Aro (Michael Sheen), is all too happy to have an opportunity to take on the Cullen’s. Now, Bella, Edward (Robert Pattinson), and the Cullens must assemble vampires from all over the world. These undead entities must function as witnesses for this meeting between our heroes and the Voltouri.
Like its predecessor, Breaking Dawn – Part Two is clearly eating up time to draw out one book into two movies. Various vampires (like a trio of Irish vampire cousins) receive extensive screen time yet don’t do anything in the actual story. The entire plot even pauses for an Emmett (Kellan Lutz) and Bella arm-wrestling match determining which of them is strongest. Awkward plot threads, like a plan involving Renesmee going to live overseas, are stretched out like taffy before petering out into nothing. Rosenberg’s script is once again stalling for time in an incredibly awkward fashion.
Rosenberg is also tasked with translating some truly abhorrent material from the source material, including Jacob’s primary plot thread of “imprinting” on Renesmee. In a nutshell, this means Jacob will eventually be Renesmee’s lover and, yes, it’s just as creepy in execution as it sounds. Meyer’s original Breaking Dawn novel clearly came up with this plot detail to provide Jacob a “consolation prize” for losing out on the Edward/Bella/Jacob love triangle. Meyer wanted to reassure Team Jacob “Don’t worry, he still gets a love interest! He didn’t really ‘lose’!”This tremendously unsettling plotline was her solution to that problem. There’s just no getting around how terribly conceived this storyline is, especially since the movie ends with a disturbing “joke” where Jacob tells Edward “Should I start calling you dad?” Breaking Dawn- Part Two, you’re only making the problem worse. This egregious facet of the storytelling reinforces that Jacob Black has been the worst part of this entire saga. From Taylor Lautner’s dismal performance to the character’s insufferable demeanor, everything about Jacob is terrible. This creepy storyline is just the poisoned cherry on top of the repulsive character sundae that is Jacob Black.
On a more positive note, other aspects of Breaking Dawn – Part Two’s narrative return the series to functioning nicely as teenage wish-fulfillment fantasies. Breaking Dawn – Part One made the creepy Mormon subtext of this whole saga flagrant text, rendering the entire film as a movie parents could live vicariously through. The franchise’s target demo of young girls was left out in the cold. Breaking Dawn – Part Two, meanwhile, has sequences that return the saga back into the hands of younger viewers. Bella getting a birthday present in the form of a beautiful, secluded cottage for her family especially encapsulates this. Living out your days with a dreamboat vampire in a woodland domicile feels like a fantasy some 14-year-old girl would pen in a Tumblr Word post shared to the world at 2:15 AM. That’s exactly the vibe and target demo Twilight should always channel.
Breaking Dawn – Part Two also has the good sense to bolster its runtime with a comically excessive cast of broadly defined vampires, including Lee Pace as an Anglophobic vampire. Breaking Dawn – Part One got way too enamored with stiff werewolf drama that nobody liked. This follow-up, meanwhile, gets enjoyable cartoony with newcomers like a pair of Russian vampires that are basically the “loose cannons” of the Cullen clan. It’s also unintentionally amusing how Bella and Edward having a kid becomes a background element. Renesmee is largely just a plot device with no personality to speak of. Bella and Edward don’t evolve much functioning in their role as parents. A conceptual game-changer for this saga doesn’t really impact much!Speaking of Renesmee, the baffling decision to render this character in CG will haunt my nightmares forevermore. Condon opts to keep the camera tigh
In pop culture, Twilight is often placed right alongside Polly Pocket and Strawberry Shortcake as juvenile “girly” entertainment. While not entirely incorrect, that perception makes Breaking Dawn – Part Two’s fake-out finale extra fun to witness. All the surprisingly brutal vampire kills from Eclipse come back ten-fold, including werewolves chomping the heads off nasty foes. One member of the Voltouri announces “Finally!” as two vampires murder him. Bella and Edward are suddenly channeling John Wick instead of Nicholas Spark’s protagonist. Rami Malek’s vampire character even uses his “mastery of the elements” to crack open the very Earth itself, exposing this battlefield to rivers of magma.
It’s all madness, with Rosenberg’s screenplay reveling in the consequence-free nature of a dream sequence. Oscillating so wildly from Part One’s wedding scene to this unhinged duel between good and evil is wickedly entertaining. Come to think of it, there’s a violent streak throughout this entire final Twilight movie that’s deeply fun to experience. Bella beating up Jacob after learning he imprinted on her daughter is a riot, especially since Edward watches this interaction with zippy “that’s my girl!” glee. Honestly, just delivering more carnage gives Breaking Dawn – Part Two more bite (no pun intended) than its predecessors. Juxtaposing mushy romance with Lee Pace slaughtering a random British musician in an alleyway, I’m a sucker for that kind of dissonance.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part Two suffers from all the faults of its predecessors. It caps off an erratic and messy saga often too buttoned-up to reach its full camp potential. Even with that reality, a strange phenomenon came over me during Breaking Dawn’s final minutes. The final proper scene of this franchise (with Edward and Bella talking amongst the field of flowers from Eclipse) ends with the camera pulling back and pages turning on the couple. Things have gone meta as Breaking Dawn, like Winnie the Pooh and Friends, depicts Bella and Edward existing inside a book. That cute touch segways into the first section of the end credits, in which all the principal Twilight Saga actors get their names put on-screen next to footage of their characters.
It doesn’t matter if you were in Breaking Dawn – Part Two or not. Everyone from Edi Gathegi from Twilight to Bryce Dallas Howard from Eclipse is highlighted here. Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” blares as The Twilight Saga tips its hat to all the on-screen performers who made these weird movies possible. The sheer scope of this montage gradually began to dawn on me as this tribute went on…and that’s when I began to cry. It was the most ridiculous thing, I only really liked two of the five Twilight movies! I was fine with never watching these movies again!
Yet here I was, sitting alone in my apartment wiping away tears as Perri belted out lines like “time has brought your heart to me” while Charlie Bewley’s name flashed up on-screen. Perhaps Perri’s vocals were just deeply moving to me…maybe it was also the mood I was in that day. However, I also think it was just the deeply sincere execution of this sequence that got to me. There are no jokes here, no wry self-deprecating lines mocking the whole Twilight phenomenon. Instead, it’s a final moment of reflection before Twilight firmly goes into the past. That ambition is executed with nary a wink to the audience. It’s all about sincere affection for the cast members who dominated these movies that meant so much to people. How can you not get swept up in that?
12 years after Breaking Dawn – Part Two’s release, these credits also register as an unexpectedly moving time capsule. Many actors in these Twilight movies (Gathegi, Anna Kendrick, Justin Chon, Pattinson & Stewart) have gone on to bigger and greater things. Could Bryce Dallas Howard have ever imagined she would be a director when she was on the set of Eclipse? Would Rami Malek have called you out of your mind if you suggested to him on the Breaking Dawn set that he’d one day win an Oscar? How could Robert Pattinson have comprehended random lines from The Lighthouse back in 2011?Twilight Tuesdays: Breaking Dawn – Part Two wraps a messy saga with bursts of enthralling camp
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part One began with monotonous wedding preparations.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part Two kicks off with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) in vampire form needing to quench her thirst for blood. This compulsion leads to Swan speeding around the forest, nearly eating some guy Free Solo-ing up a mountain, and eventually viciously attacking a mountain lion for dinner. The shackles are off for director Bill Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg. The first Breaking Dawn movie wielded strong PureFlix vibes. Now, the Sunday school sermon is over. Twilight is going out with a preposterous bang.
Once Bella has done a quick run with her newfound vampire powers, it’s time to focus on Renesmee (Mackenz
