Re-watching The Twilight Saga: Eclipse film, one can say for certain that Twilight isn’t as terrible a franchise as we remember it being. Some of the films are downright bad (Breaking Dawn to be more precise), but the first three films are only disappointingly mediocre and subpar. They’re not the worst thing to happen to films or the fantasy genre, but considering all the hype garnered by the franchise, the products are all certainly a major disappointment.
Among the better Twilight films, is David Slade’s The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which is also arguably the best Twilight film altogether. Though just like its predecessor The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the improvements are still mainly technical. It’s interesting how despite the many changes of directors, the end result of Twilight films has always been middling or worse.
What deserves most of the blame, of course, would be the source material itself. Such source material would obviously pique the interest of studios looking for weak substance in their storytelling, and even if a good director was mistakenly hired, they’d have to comply with both; the studio and the source. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse still manages to be a fantasy flick worth watching granted that you liked the first two films.
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The Movie Review
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse takes place as a consequence of events that happened in The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Victoria seeks revenge from Edward Cullen for killing James, who she loved greatly. She wreaks havoc by assaulting Riley Biers to create an army of newborns for aiding her in her revenge mission.
On the other end, Edward and Bella contemplate tightening their bonds, which leads to the idea of Bella becoming an immortal vampire too. Edward, however, sets the condition that he would turn her into one only after she’d marry him, which makes it difficult for Bella due to her not wanting to marry at such a young age.
What elevates this film (even if slightly) in comparison to all other Twilight franchise films is that there exists at least some suspense about what’s coming for the characters, even if they are not themselves interesting. But what goes on during all the build-up towards the final threat? Several scenes of communication among two or all of Edward, Bella, and Jacob.
Using dialogue during a ‘calm before the storm’ scenario is not bad at all, but knowing the Twilight franchise’s writing, it’s bound to be corny as hell and ends up tarnishing most of the intensity that builds up towards the third act.
Pattinson and Stewart have always had good potential, but the storyline barely allows either to shine. Melissa Rosenberg’s screenplay in no way manages to improve on the source material.
The second half of the film involves a lot more intense drama, though most of it is intense only if summarized. The last act is brutal and involves a lot of killing, in a sequence where very little goes wrong, besides the fact that it was terribly built up.
Somehow, the overload of boring dialogue would be much more violent to the audience than all the killing that happens in the third act. Not that Melissa Rosenberg is herself to blame for adapting a weak storyline, but things could’ve been written better even in this case.
It does, however, have much more of an element of surprise than the first two films, which puts it a tiny bit ahead of the two in terms of story.
The technical aspects in this entry are undoubtedly the best in a Twilight film. Howard Shore of The Lord of the Rings fame made an original score that provides a lot of positive energy to the film in technical aspects. Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography is fairly aesthetic too, even though doesn’t aid the story much, for which David Slade’s direction is mainly to blame.
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is arguably the best film in the entire franchise, but that doesn’t say much, considering how mediocre the franchise has entirely been. It involves a suspenseful storm to look forward to, but the calm before it is very counter-intuitive.
