I do not own the above image. Copyright Summit Entertainment. All rights reserved. For entertainment purposes only.
Good
news, everyone! Bella Swan (Stewart) is
not dead. Bad news: she is not exactly
alive either. The transfusion during the
birth worked and Bella is now a vampire & a mother. So she, Edward
(Pattinson) and daughter Renesmee can go away and we all can have happy lives
right? Wrong! A serious misunderstanding leads the Volturi
believe Renesmee was originally a human, which breaks vampire law, and the
Cullens must be destroyed. But they won’t
go down easily.
And
therein lies the problem with the series: the movie does not get to the end
credits soon enough. To paraphrase the
late Johnny Carson, The Twilight Saga is about five hours of sparkling
entertainment, spread out over ten hours of movies. But Breaking Dawn Part Deux may be the
biggest culprit. About 35 minutes is
wasted traveling to all points of the globe to find witnesses to the mutant
beauty of Renesmee, only to not really use it.
Another 35 minutes is used to show just how happy Bella is to be a
vampire now, even though KStew has major issues trying to express any emotion
at all.
For
all intents & purposes, The Twilight Saga has featured a bunch of no names
and bad actors. No actor is worse than
Taylor Lautner. I have never seen a
worse actor get top billing in a movie.
Never. I don’t hate Lautner. I just feel he should find another
profession.
But he shouldn’t exit stage
right alone. After Part Deux, I have
officially moved into the “Kristen Stewart is a terrible actress” camp. Anytime she should have a clear emotion, she
looks conflicted or like she is having a vicious bowel movement. Robert Pattinson, on the other hand, needs to
hire an acting coach and disappear for about a year. He has potential, not a lot but way, way more
than the other two.
Most
of the rest of the cast are a bunch of nobodies who I suspect won’t get more
than two lines in anything for the rest of their careers. If someone told me the only people who would
hire Lee Pace are the folks involved with this, I’d say Hollywood is a really
sad place. Dakota Fanning was in four of
these and did one thing, which I will get to in a moment. But the star of Part Deux is Michael Sheen. I can’t remember an actor having this much
fun on screen. One of his line readings
got one of the ten biggest laughs I have ever heard in a movie theatre. It is almost as if Sheen said to himself, “Boy,
everyone here looks like they at a funeral.
Let’s see if I can cheer them up.”
For
as much money that was spent on this movie, I see the minimum went into the
visuals. First, there’s a three & a
half minute opening credit sequence that would feel out of place in a Pacific
Northwest nature documentary. Second,
the effects during the action scenes look like they were done by the best
visual effects team of 1997. But worst
of all, director Bill Condon made the decision to computerize Renesmee’s
face. With effects that would work in a
horror movie. The effects are at least
$10-12 million under budget.
There
is a lot of buzz about what happens at the end.
I won’t spoil it for you. But
while what occurs is the best 15-20 minutes in the series, what happens immediately
after is the most infuriating. When the
sequence is over, we realize some things.
First, that the crew, especially Condon & screenwriter Melissa
Rosenberg, truly believes that the audience is extremely stupid. Stupid enough to think that just because
about twenty minutes of this movie is entertaining, in extremely campy fashion
by the way, that we will forget the other 100 awful minutes and call the movie “good”.
But second, and most important,
that writer Rosenberg is entirely capable of writing something of
substance. The spoiler sequence is a
deviation from the book but then cops out and returns to the boring, simple
book ending, still leaving several unanswered subplot questions. If “author” Stephenie Meyer allowed Rosenberg
to change what she changed at the end of Part Deux, I would think that asking
Meyer to change or straight up cut scenes that only serve to satisfy fans. Or is that what Rosenberg is, a fan first
& screenwriter second. I have no
issue with fans working on movies. But
understand that not everyone watching will have read the books let alone be a
fanatic. Take The Lord of the Rings
trilogy. Peter Jackson is a fan. But Jackson realized that certain things
needed cut in order for the movies to work and appeal to all audiences. To this day, 12 years after filming ended,
Jackson still gets it for removing Tom Bombadil from the story, with Jackson
simply saying that Tom didn’t add anything to the main adventure. There are so many moments in Breaking Dawn
Part Deux: Electric Boogaloo that serve little purpose or are virtual copies of
previous scenes. Minutes of all our
lives could have been saved but someone in the editing room saying, “Does Jacob
need to take his shirt off three times in four minutes?”
Our
moviegoing experience was something else.
We showed up 45 minutes before the show to get seats to observe the
crowd. Immediately, a group of 6 girls sits
to our immediate right. They talked
right through the commercials & trailers and even the beginning of the
movie before we quieted them. Throughout
the movie, people would take their leisurely time walking out for whatever
reason. One teenage girl did it
thrice. At the end of the movie, no one,
not even the six girls beside us, talked about the movie. Instead, they talked about tomorrow or Sunday
or next weekend. Am I shocked? A little.
I mean, why would you wait in line 45 minutes before to see the “movie
event of the season”? This leads me to
believe that many, at least at my showing, that it is less about seeing the
movie and more being seen at the movie.
Worst of all, these people are slobs.
The Wreck-It Ralph screening we went to, full of 6 year olds, needed a
lighter cleaning crew.
Breaking
Dawn Part Two is an 85 minute movie with a plot contrivance that adds at least
thirty. Hopefully, Bill Condon gets to
make whatever movie his Oscar winning self wants. Just about everyone else? I could care less about them. Words cannot describe just how pissed the
last 25 minutes made me when all was said & done. And with all of these things combined, I fear
the future for movies. Breaking Dawn
Part Deux, coupled with its four predecessors, is a deep tear on the painting
that is the history of motion pictures.
I hope that we can all one day, sooner rather than later, look back
& laugh. Laugh at ourselves for
being duped into watching these. These
hideous, amateur excuses for movies.
*1/2
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