Like its metformin side effects weight gain predecessors before it, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse manages to be a vast improvement on the text it was based on. Not that it’s a big a mystery that anything that makes the Twilight experience shorter can improve a long, rambling sequence of boring characters declaring their love for each other. But still, this movie is an amusing piece of entertainment, and beside that, Eclipse manages to fit in tonally with the awesomely-terrible franchise while adding in some badassness.
So the metformin 1000 mg day plot of the movie is this: Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the over-protective vampire, is trying to convince Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), the boring and personality-less human, to marry him. Bella’s all, “Shotgun wedding, much?” and Edward’s all, “I’m old fashioned, cuz I’m old.” And then Charlie (Billy Burke), Bella’s wise and mustachioed dad, is all, “Maybe you two idiot teenagers shouldn’t spend so much time together. Your relationship is creepy.” And then Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), the naive and overly sincere werewolf and mortal enemy of vampires, is all, “Hey, Bella, I’m in love with you, too. Maybe if you could stop being in your unhealthy relationship, you could make out with me sometime. K, thanks, bye.” Also, a vampire army is being raised up in Seattle (which is vaguely near Forks) and Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard), the avenging vampire, is behind it just so she can kill Bella.
If you’re thinking, “Hey, that’s not much of a plot,” I’m telling you, “No. It’s not, but thank God I never have to reread this meandering and boring novel ever again because I can watch the more entertaining movie instead, if so help me I decide to relive the experience.” Seriously. The fact that I didn’t have to read every inane conversation mostly consisting of
“Marry me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Do you love me?”
“Of course.”
“Then marry me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
is a blessed occurrence in and of itself. Thankfully, those moments of the film, while still painfully existing, were overshadowed by some of the darker turns in this chapter of the Twilight Saga.
From the moment the Eclipse begins, there is far more violence than the past films–and fairly graphic for a PG-13 movie aimed at girls–that at least gives the illusion of high stakes. If I actually cared about Edward and Bella’s relationship, this might have been troubling. But the fact of the matter is that you don’t have to care that much about E. and B., you can just pay attention to the rather engaging fight scenes. Some of it is still goofy, what with the werewolves always looking a little too big and the vampires’ super-fast running, but the film makes the marble-like vampires of the Twilight universe satisfyingly crack with every beheading. For goodness sake, someone’s hand gets bitten off followed by a scream that would make Luke Skywalker proud.
And under the list of things that were surprisingly great in the movie but awful in the book includes a foreshadowing Native American legend and several flashbacks of the Cullen Coven. Instead of the most boring tangents in an already boring story, these side stories manage to be engaging. I mean, my almost-crush on Jasper Cullen (Jackson Rathbone) from the first movie resurged thanks to a backstory that, SPOILER ALERT, involves him being a major in the Confederate army. Civil War era uniform? My kind of sexy. In fact, I wish his backstory was just the whole story. But this is almost beside the ultimate win of the movie.
That win belongs to Billy Burke. The fact that he manages to play a character that is 1) likable, 2) relatable, and 3) reasonable is a miracle and is far beyond what is called for in this movie. Billy, you deserve every good thing in life. If there was an award for bringing realism and humor to the most ridiculously ponderous of movies, I would give it to you.
So there you have it. Eclipse has turned me to Team Charlie.
Overall: 4 out of 10
Directed by David Slade. Adapted for the Screen by Melissa Rosenberg. Cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe. Edited by Art Jones and Nancy Richardson. Production Design by Paul D. Austerberry. Music by Howard Shore.
Also Starring: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Bryce Dallas Howard, Billy Burke, and Dakota Fanning.
