Century of the Vampire: The Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn, Parts 1 and 2 (2011, 2012)

Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.

Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 2025 video game developed by The Chinese Room, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. Today, he looks at the 2011 and 2012 Bill Condon films The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Parts 1 and 2. This article will contain spoilers.

This one took two weeks because these films are painful.

I’ve beaten the drum before about how BloodRayne (2005) is the worst movie, holistically, this feature will ever cover. I truly believe that. I don’t think it can be defeated (“defeated”) by anything with baseline Hollywood craftsmanship. The worst of the Underworld movies -- that third one, the prequel -- at least had some moderately interesting sets. Even that TV movie Once Bitten from a month back had Cleavon Little bringing some dignity to a gay character in the 80s. BloodRayne is undefeated. But I’ve said it before, there’s room in that tier right above it, and one of these two films is solidly in there.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011); we’ll get through this one quick because nothing happens in this movie. Holy shit. The first hour (the first full hour!) of the film is Edward and Bella’s wedding and honeymoon, which are incredibly normie and non-vampire or werewolf-y, to the tastes of this particular production -- we get some Jacob whining in here at the eleventh hour, we get Anna Kendrick and the rest of the high school friends finally written out of the franchise, we get none of this done well at all; Billy Burke (Charlie Swan, Bella’s dad) remains the utility player and heart & soul of this lineup, because as rote as “kinda baffled but rolling with it single dad” is as a character, he does it well and relatably around all these rich, benevolent freaks. The fun ends when Edward somehow gets Bella pregnant; at this point she’s still human and he’s still a risen corpse that drinks blood, so they’re both somewhat surprised.

Jacob comes by to advocate for abortion; the werewolves of Forks, Washington agree with him. (A sidenote here: This movie was a flashpoint in cultural criticism at the time of its release for being anti-choice and depicting a mother choosing to keep her baby even though it’s killing her; I can see the validity of the criticism and I agree with it, but 14 years down the line it feels so quaint and stupidly-done, as far as agitprop goes. The idea of learning life lessons and taking life advice from Bella Swan and her personal decisions just seems insane to me. And fair play as far as it goes: The pregnancy really does kill this idiot! No one in real life gets to come back as a vampire!) Another werewolf, Sam, who has been hanging around previously and will be in the film after this but hasn’t been important really at all until now, is more of a hardliner: Bella has to die too. We go back and forth on this for another, Jesus Christ let me check, half hour, intercut with Bella’s failing health because she’s giving birth to a vampire baby. Eventually Jacob settles things with his people -- one thing I will give these last two films credit for is that both Edward and Jacob cool it on both the shithead gaslighting and the misogynist violence -- while Bella’s condition goes critical.

The one slightly interesting thing about this movie, which I believe is unintentional in the source material but very much is not so in the film adaptation of it, is the body horror around Bella’s pregnancy. There is an evil demon child in her that is killing her, and if necessary it will eat its way out of her belly. Since this is a Stephanie Meyer production, she of course still loves her baby and is vindicated in that decision by getting everything she wants out of the exchange (she gets to have a baby; she gets to die; she gets to become a vampire), but they go very hard on the makeup and Stewart does a good job with the acting. Anyway Edward has to choose between her dying in childbirth and turning her, so he turns her, and finally, Bella is a vampire. At the end of the fourth film. After they put it off for three whole films. Come on!

I can appreciate the bind they were in -- there’s a version of Breaking Dawn that is three hours that’s even more unwatchable than these two movies because of how bloated it is, and the wedding, pregnancy, and birth of the vampire child are incredibly important events with heavy weight given what the franchise prioritizes, which is the relationship and romance stuff (which to be clear it is terrible at writing; it’s novel for fans of this genre to get serviced like this at this kind of budget point with these kinds of actors, but the material itself is just not good). I can also appreciate that they weren’t exactly broken up about the concept of splitting one box office into two.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012) is at least actually a movie, and it’s a fine enough capstone for what we’re doing here. It’s probably the best of these movies? I’ve lost perspective. It is the last of these movies. It’s also a superhero movie; much of the middle of this film is about meeting the special vampires of the world and learning about their special powers, like Electric Zap and Pain Vision and Control of the Elements and Death Cloud. Superspeed, super strength, psychic powers, and of course Bella’s swiss army knife power of Shield, which can negate other powers and also provide active camouflage.

This is the only movie we get in the franchise where Bella is a vampire with vampire powers and where Kristin Stewart is allowed to play the character’s anger as something other than impotent. When she learns that her creepy vampire baby has “imprinted” on Jacob (remember what franchise we’re in, this isn’t a sex thing), she grabs him by the scruff of his neck and pretty literally dogwalks him outside, then slaps around his werewolf buddies when they try to say something about it. Since they’re giant doggies, they do sad doggy whining and she instantly regrets her deeds, but it’s good she’s setting boundaries. Life in the Cullen household settles into a weird cadence of normal, because Jacob has moved in as some kind of combination sworn knight protector and uncle to the new kid, who again, is creepy. We’ve got a 2012 CGI baby running around and honestly I understand why everyone wants to kill this thing. It’s growing up really quick (and has a very stupid name, Renesmee) and looks uncanny and demonic even when it reaches actress Mackenzie Foy’s real age and it’s just her playing the character; Foy looks perfectly normal in press photos so I’m going to blame further digital touchups for why even tween Renesmee is a creep. (There's a famous extremely evil baby-puppet version of this character floating around, but the footage of it comes from cut footage and DVD extras.)

The plot is that Michael Sheen’s Italian vampires are coming to the Pacific Northwest to kill the Cullens because turning children into vampires is against Vampire Law. There are like, very plainly obvious and very good reasons why turning a middle-schooler with undeveloped impulse control and moral sensibility into an undead killing machine is a bad idea, and indeed the movie shows us the outcome here -- a beautiful blonde-haired cherubic ten year old standing over the corpses of a whole French village he’s consumed -- but we’re still not supposed to want this abomination put to the flame along with whoever was stupid enough to sire it because this franchise just loves mommas and babies, and the child is just so cute, and aren’t these weird Italians so evil for enforcing Vampire Law? In order to keep Sheen and company evil, our man is in full taking-the-piss virtuoso soap opera Dracula mode, gliding and grinning, constantly either presenting his own dainty hand for lessers to kiss his ring or taking their own hands so he can read their minds. We meet the international Vampire superfriends, because the idea here is that when the Italians come to Washington state, they’ll just show them that Edward and Bella didn’t turn a child into a vampire; instead, they birthed a cursed and unholy abomination. That’s not technically against Vampire Law, because Vampire Law didn’t account for it before now, so they should be fine.

This brings us to the first, last, and only genuinely fun scene of the five movie set, where the Cullens and their crew throw down with the Italians on a big snowy field somewhere out in the woods. This fight rules. It opens with Daddy Cullen getting his head ripped off in a goofy sendup of the “two samurai cut past each other, pause, and one collapses dead” trope, and then we get a bloodless but still hilariously brutal final battle where Edward does the Reverse Neckbreaker 2 wrestling move from every PlayStation 2 WWE game except he rips the guy’s head off at the end, and where the smug teeny-bopper Pain Vision blonde gets her head ripped off by an angry werewolf. There have to be about a dozen mostly-onscreen decapitations in this fight, including one where a guy gets his head pulled off by the upper jaw instead of at the neck.

So of course, then, as soon as it’s over and Michael Sheen meets his fiery final death after Bella and Edward hit their tag team finisher on him, we snap back to before the fight started. It was all a dream! You see, this is still fundamentally a Stephanie Meyer joint, and we’re going to resolve the final conflict the same way as all the others: Everyone’s just gonna talk for a little bit and then go their separate ways. Incredible. There's also some pretty goofy early 2010s "we're trying to do Representation of indigenous people but that still basically means they're magic plot devices in funny costumes" stuff that plays into the end here with wise heroic vampires from the Amazon, but that stuff barely registers with how conceptually stupid everything around it is.

I’d say “read a summary of Breaking Dawn Part 1 and then just watch Part 2 if you’re interested,” but if you’re actually interested in watching these films, you have vastly different priorities in your life than me and I don’t understand you, so I can’t give you advice. I watched these five movies for my job, due to a Patreon poll where people who paid money for the privilege actively voted to make me miserable. I don’t think you should watch any of these films. That said, this last one at least has the low quality but kinetic charm of a television show for young adults on The CW Network. Not one of the good ones, but definitely in that conversation. If you’re in some situation where you’re obligated to watch all of these movies in a row, they’ll end on something resembling a relatively high note.

I’m off next week, but I’m writing up a recap post for the work we’ve done in Century of the Vampire so far that will run then. The original idea was to do this for a year and then wrap it up; that date is coming up in late January. However, there’s still a lot of actual good stuff -- or at least enjoyable stuff -- that’s still out there to watch, and now that the patrons have made me sit through all the really execrable mainstream vampire films of the last twenty years, they have fewer ways to avoid letting me watch and write about it now. So we’ll see how long this goes.

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Tags: century of the vampire | the twilight saga | breaking dawn