It’s probably foolish to be reviewing a movie that is the third in a series when one hasn’t seen the first two, but this week I have no choice: there’s nothing else opening except The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Well, there are a couple of Bollywoods, but those are seldom previewed and are, in any case, critic-proof.
As, in fact, is Eclipse. I doubt that its target market of girls and young women between the ages of about 10 and 25 are likely to make their movie-going choices on the basis of what any critic says. A 10-year-old of my acquaintance declares that Eclipse is her favourite film of the year, even though she hasn’t seen it yet.
The appeal of the films is clearly widespread in that age group and that gender. Basically, they are about the romantic and social issues of a high-school girl. She’s Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and she’s torn between two potential boyfriends, Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Jake (Taylor Lautner). Each belongs to a separate group, so Bella’s dilemmas are like those of any high-school girl divided between competing social cliques — the geeks and the sporties, say. Except in Bella’s case it’s the vampires versus the werewolves.
As Eclipse begins, Bella has settled on Edward the vampire as her great love. She wants him to “change” her — that is, turn her into a vampire. This is scheduled to take place just after her high-school graduation, the event that looms large in the film as a kind of horizon of possibility. And of course it’s also cause for much heart-clenching and eyebrow-furrowing debate: does she really want to check out of “real life” and join the Cold Ones (as their traditional enemies, the werewolves, call them)?
It seems that becoming a vampire will mean Bella will have neither children nor a “normal” family life. It’s not clear whether it would allow for a sex life at all, or whether the vampire’s flesh is indeed so cold to the touch. The only transformation that would be sure, from the visual evidence, is that she’d get a lot of pancake pallor and some contact lenses that intermittently go orange. Oh, yes, and her incisors would be a little more pointy. Certainly, Jake’s argument that he makes better husby material because he’s warmer and she wouldn’t have to “change” makes a lot of sense.
What all this means is that Bella and we, the audience, are now stuck in a love triangle of the kind that animated, if that’s not too strong word, the recently renewed Spider-Man franchise. This is tedious. It’s a lazy storytelling device, allowing the filmmakers to bounce Bella between Vamp Guy and Wolfboy, back and forth, back and forth … It’s roughly as compelling as watching any individual take an inordinate length of time to make up his or her mind. (The exception is Hamlet, and that has language on its side.)
Marriage is also a big issue, of course, for Bella: another horizon of possibility, and another driver of endless, pointless discussion, conflict and indecision. The presumption is that the marriage will be monogamous — no possibility of a ménage à trois here. But then this isn’t Jules et Jim; it’s more likely that Bella will grow up to be Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies, caught in the eternal war of vampires versus werewolves.
How dull. It’s not like these vampires or werewolves are very interesting, or no more so than the average American high-school student trapped in his or her own little world. They don’t do much in the way of biting or hunting or anything nasty like that. I suppose that, for now, they do have to focus on their matric exams.