BOTH DIRECTED BY BILL CONDON AND BOTH SCREENPLAYS BY MELISSA ROSENBERG.
STARRING KRISTEN STEWART, ROBERT PATTINSON, TAYLOR LAUTNER, PETER FACINELLI AND BILLY BURKE.
BASED ON THE BOOKS BY STEPHENIE MEYER.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
I thoroughly enjoyed both of these instalments of the TWILIGHT movie franchise. Who doesn’t love a comically mismatched wedding (a human female and a vampire male), an hilarious honeymoon where sex with the groom nearly cripples the bride, a pregnancy that makes itself known after just two weeks and a baby that’s practically walking and talking unaided by the time the loved-up couple exit the plane at the end of the honeymoon? And I’m only exaggerating, like, a teensy tiny little bit, you’ll see.
So, to elaborate a tad, Bella Swan, human female of Forks, Washington, recently graduated from high school, is marrying Edward Cullen, local vampire, nicknamed Sparkles by me for What He Does In The Sunlight, the big wuss, lol.
Their families and friends are out in full force to support them, even though Bella’s lovely kind father Charlie, the Sheriff of Forks, has his misgivings, and he doesn’t even know yet that the Cullens are bleedin’ vampires to a man…!
The wedding is a fairy-tale one, with rose petals everywhere and Bella in a beautiful white dress, because she really is still a virgin. The honeymoon is on a gorgeous paradise island which they’ll have to themselves, except for the caretakers. Edward and Bella finally do on the island what they’ve been threatening to do all franchise… have sex…
It seems to go well, but next morning their bedroom is completely trashed and there are big bruises all over Bella, because she’s still only a puny human and Edward is a powerful vampire who, believe it or not, was holding back when he made love to Bella so that he didn’t crush her to death in his manly kung-fu grip or something.
Two weeks later, Bella and Edward have had to dash home because Bella is seemingly pregnant, which all the vampires seem to be shocked at for some reason. Can’t vampires get human females pregnant if they have sex? It’s what seems to have happened, nonetheless, and the Cullen family now have to deal with it.
Giving birth to a vampire’s baby when you’re still a human is a dangerous business and it very nearly kills Bella. Her father Charlie is terrified for her health in general, though he doesn’t know about the baby yet, and her other true love, part-time werewolf Jacob Black- the wolves are the mortal enemies of the vampires- wants to murder Edward for putting the love of both their lives in such mortal danger.
Sparkles has caused this entire ridiculous hoo-ha with his big sparkly willy. Yep, willies- sparkly or not- will do that. Ah, willies, is it? (Read in the style of a grizzly old frontiers-man!) Came across a-couple of ‘em in mah time, up there on Bear Mountain. Mostly bears up there most of the year, don’t usually get no willies no-how, but that one summer, oh, how I seen ‘em…! So many darn willies. The one that got away, even bigger that the two I catched…!
The CGI and special effects around Bella’s physical deterioration are actually superb, although it’s uncomfortable to see her looking like a concentration camp victim. The baby is taking all of Bella’s nutrition- yep, they’ll do that!- and it looks like Bella might genuinely die of starvation when Carlisle, the Cullen family paterfamilias and a doctor of medicine, steps in and feeds Bella a load of human blood just to stop her from dying of hunger.
A sort of Uma-Thurman-in-PULP FICTION situation occurs very dramatically, however, and Edward Cullen’s instantaneous John Travolta-style reaction results in the one thing that Bella has wanted all along, apart from her precious baby… Bella becomes a vampire, and, boy, is there going to be a lot of explaining to do in the Christmas newsletter this year…!
BREAKING DAWN 2 sees the Cullens and the Blacks getting acclimatised to having the new baby around. Bella has named the little girl ‘Renesmee’ in honour of both their mothers. Jacob Black, the part werewolf, has ‘imprinted’ on the baby, which means that he is honour-bound to protect her from all harm for the rest of both their lives. I think it also means that he has to marry her when she’s of an age, which is quite creepy…!
The baby has grown at an unnatural rate, and is practically getting ready to go off to college when word comes that the vampire police, the Volturi, are coming from Italy to kill the baby, as they believe her to be an ‘Immortal’ baby, one that could be a threat to them. She’s not what they think, however, so the Cullens go about amassing ‘witnesses,’ ie, other vampires, to put in a good word for them. For all the good it might do…
The battle itself is great fun. Dakota Fanning as the bitchy Jane, Volturi Queen of Pain, gets knocked on her ass, as does Michael Sheen as Aro, the highly camp leader of this very camp conglomeration of vampires. Bella, the newborn vampire, acquits herself well in her first skirmish and is a fiercely loving and loyal mother to Renesmee.
Rami Malek, who stars as Freddie Mercury in the superb BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018), weighs in on the side of the Cullens, as do the werewolves, while Jacob Black heroically guards Renesmee. But, when the dust settles, where will Bella, Edward and Renesmee stand?
I assume the Cullens will continue to stand where they always have, in their beautiful glasshouse in the forest, in a straight line as usual, fully dressed at all times in smart-casual designer clobber. They’re never caught short or taken by surprise or doing anything when Alice has one of her ‘visions,’ which always require immediate action.
No-one’s ever in the toilet, or fiddling around with the fuseboard or doing a Sudoku or anything. I really think they must stand around in a state of suspended animation until Alice comes in and tersely delivers one of her pronouncements, which are never good news. They all look like dolls, action figures that have to be moved into position by the child who owns them. Maybe a child does own them! It would explain a lot.
The entire cast get a shout-out in the end credits while the viewers are free to bawl their eyes out from the very opening bars of Christina Perri’s song, A Thousand Years, which even I, a relative newbie to the franchise, will always now associate with the TWILIGHT movies.
I’ve put the cart before the horse a bit, I know, by watching the films first, but I now intend to read the books as well. I don’t do owt by halves, me. Does that make me a Twilight mom, albeit ten years too late? If it does, it does. Sparkle on, Twilight fans. Sparkle on…
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her new book, THIRTEEN STOPS EARLIER, is out now from Poolbeg Books:
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:
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