Century of the Vampire: The Twilight Saga Eclipse (2010)

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 2009 Chris Weitz movie The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Today, he looks at the 2010 David Slade movie, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. This article will contain spoilers.

The honeymoon period for these films is over for me, sadly -- which is ironic, or maybe just downright irritating, because these idiots spend a whole additional movie not getting hitched.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is a real case of meandering around and wasting time. I was hoping we’d at least get Edward and Jacob actually throwing down here; that’s how you’d usually structure something like this, right? The vampires and the werewolves, who have pre-existing territorial beef, finally throw hands because the dumbest hot boy in each gang wants to marry Bella Swan; the vampire wins because it’s clear that’s the way this is heading and always has been heading; and then in the -- good god -- two part adaptation of the final book, they team up against some vague threat, finally friends, and everyone ends on good terms while dealing with a vampire baby.

Instead, we’ve got the team up here; we’re postponing Bella’s marriage and turn another film because, well, the original author Stephanie Meyer wasn’t great at plotting and the producers adapting the series didn’t want to change much from a vision that had experienced so much commercial success. I again have not read the novels, but I’ve read summaries of them, and they seem to be following the depicted events real closely.

You’ll recall the last movie ended with the Cullens in Italy in front of the vampire overlords there with everyone engaging in an escalating “No, kill me instead!” standoff. That business wrapped up with the “compromise” that Bella would marry Edward, which is the outcome these two have been moving towards since the beginning of the first movie. To the extent there is conflict in these films, the conflict is between Edward and Bella on one side and all the roadblocks that life and undeath throw in their way to getting married on the other. So of course, Eclipse opens with Bella saying the wedding’s off because she wants to continue her studies. Actually, it’s a bit more baffling: Edward is proposing marriage in a field -- wasn’t this basically already handled at the end of the last movie? I guess it’s better than just playing the scene from New Movie over again -- and she turns him down so she can go to school. In a vacuum, great. I support getting that degree and that paper instead of marrying the untrustworthy dipshit rich boy who is going to make you sign a pre-nup. In context, I don’t trust Bella Swan to be making this decision for any rational reason, or even any laudable irrational reason, because I know Bella too well by now.

This is the first movie where I actually started hating both of these boys, Edward and Jacob, because now we’re getting into the real shitty male behavior section of the saga. In Meyer’s formulation, and we’ll resist psychoanalyzing or pathologizing any further than what’s on the screen, these two idiots compete for Bella’s affection not by directly confronting one another or by doing grand deeds to impress her, but just by doing flagrantly abusive things to Bella. One might argue that’s depressingly realistic male behavior; if we’re going to go down that road, then I need some other things about this movie to be realistic too, like the Cullens not being such one-note good guys. This family eats people. You want to inject some dour realism into the proceedings, we can start there.

Anyway, Bella decides she’s gonna go see Jacob, so Edward jacks up her car to stop her from leaving. When she complains, he smugly tells her that if she really doesn’t like it, don’t leave the window open for him tonight. Because Bella is in fact Into This Stuff, that window obviously stays open. It’s cool when a jealous man fucks up your sole means of asserting your independent mobility in a car-based society! It shows you he cares! It doesn’t matter if he talks to you like you’re twelve! (His exact line: “I’ll understand if you’re too angry for me to come to your room tonight.” Creep.)

Lest the sympathy pendulum swing too far towards werewolf boy, when she does get out to visit the tribe in the second act of the film, Jacob forces her to kiss him and she almost breaks her hand on his strong, manly werewolf body trying to get him off of her. Again, these boys just love too hard and too passionately! And it’s hard to get too up in arms about all this when Bella herself is thrilled to have the two monster men fighting over her, through her, like this. There might be something there if we were leaning into the monstrosity, and Edward and Jacob were doing things related to their conditions, with the requisite blood and violence. When you strip away all the metaphor and just have these dudes doing things tens of thousands of crappy men get restraining orders for every year in America, what, artistically, are we bringing to the table?

There is a plot in this movie; it’s not a good one. Victoria’s back, now played by Bryce Dallas Howard and group-turning Seattle’s vagrants, loners, runaways, and the like into an army of low intelligence but high aggression footsoldiers. This is pretty much beat for beat the Vampire: The Masquerade concept of “thin-bloods,” though as you’ll recall, Meyer got her ideas for this series not from debased pop culture vampire media but via dream, so clearly that’s just a coincidence. The Cullens and werewolves team up, win the fight (Victoria is actually killed here, so she won’t be back to abruptly show up after 90 minutes in yet another one of these films), and the evil Italian vampire lords teleport onto the scene to establish that yes, they will be the villains for the final two movies of this franchise and yes, they do remember that they told Edward to put a ring on it at the end of the last film. Where’s the rock on your finger, young lady? Why are you still alive? Once again Bella promises to get hitched to Edward, for real this time, so that she can achieve her primary goal of dying.

In between all this a whole lot of talking happens. Some of it’s even well done, because these are good performers! If you’re dedicated to shipping Jacob and Edward, those two have a much better moody, conflicted relationship energy when they’re talking over their anti-Seattle team-up than either straight relationship in the love triangle is ever allowed to have. Edward getting distracted by Jacob’s abs mid-conversation with Bella and blurting out, “Doesn’t he own a shirt?” is probably the best single moment of the series so far, though the bar on that one is somewhere below the basement. Hell, if you’re a proponent of the vampire-werewolf-human throuple that obviously is the end state of a better written, less Mormon version of this franchise, there’s at least one scene for you here too, up in the tent on the mountains when Bella has to cuddle up with Jacob not to die of exposure and vampire boy just sits nearby watching. Now, there’s another way to read that scene, but the actors do a good job with poor material and I came out of that configuration thinking throuple, instead of the other thing. When Lautner delivers Jacob's line to Bella, with her in his arms, that she'd warm up, "Faster if you took your clothes off," he is actually speaking directly to Pattinson's Edward and making eye contact. Yeah, buddy, this whole enterprise would be going a lot faster if you'd all take your clothes off.

I’m reviewing my notes from when I watched Eclipse -- I’ve had to start taking careful notes on these to keep myself engaged; I’ve written every previous entry in this column by just watching the thing and synthesizing it and going back to recheck things while writing, but these films require extra effort -- and so many of them are just strings of profanity with barely-helpful referents attached. For instance, “what the fuck man you’re a vampire. have some self respect” could be about so many scenes. I spend a lengthy section cussing out Jacob for his romantic display of sexual assault. The notes briefly go into all-caps, for, well:

THE GREAT TALE FROM THE WEREWOLF TRIBE IS ABOUT A WIFE COMMITTING SUICIDE TO DISTRACT SOMEONE
BELLA DOESN'T NEED TO HEAR THAT
SHE ALREADY ALWAYS WANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE FOR ATTENTION

(This does play into the finale of the movie; Bella once again cuts herself open to distract Victoria so Edward can land his killshot. The woman has one move, self-harm, and somehow it is always the winning move to make.)

What I am saying here is that I need a temporary break from the Twilight franchise. We’ll be doing something else next week; either I will take the week off, or I’ll have a review of a non-movie piece of vampire media that I’m having a much better time with. Then, once I’ve regained my composure, we’ll be back to tackle the last two films in this franchise.

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Tags: century of the vampire | the twilight saga | eclipse