REVIEW: Actors Might Give Up on Eclipse, But Fans Won't

It's all too tempting to look down on the Twilight movie series -- based on Stephenie Meyer's explosively popular series of novels -- as quickie pictures designed to herd in large audiences of indiscriminate, ticket-buying, Robert Pattinson-and/or-Taylor Lautner-loving teen- and tweenage girls. And with the exception of the first movie in the series, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, that's exactly what they are. The real horror isn't simply that these movies are bad -- plenty of us were raised on, and loved, junk movies and crap TV. It's that the folks at the top don't think teen and tween audiences deserve better. The latest installment, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, directed by David Slade (30 Days of Night, Hard Candy), while admittedly an improvement over last year's barely coherent New Moon, only adds insult to injury. Nothing so grand as a real eclipse, it's more just a massive blind spot.

The plot of Eclipse is nearly impossible to follow until you realize that the story isn't told so much as it's announced. Watch for signpost dialogue along the lines of "Victoria is behind all this!" and "The Newborn Army is coming!" Essentially, a bunch of young people in Seattle are being turned into "newborn" vampires -- vampires, we're told, are hungriest and most ruthless when they're young. These snarling, golden-eyed ragamuffins may be puppets-in-training. And they just may make their way from Seattle to Forks, Washington, home of high school senior Bella (Kristen Stewart). Do they want to kill her, intimidate her, or just sniff her flannel shirt? The vampire Cullens and the werewolf Wolf Pack set aside their differences to protect Bella and their respective communities from the Newborns.

Meanwhile, eternal paleface Edward Cullen (Pattinson) and passionate, nature-loving Native American Jacob Black (Lautner) vie for Bella's affections. Edward, the old-fashioned type, has vowed that he'll love her beyond the end of time into infinity -- squared! -- and asks repeatedly for her hand in marriage. Jacob has assured her, practically in so many words, that he's hot in the sack. Bella must choose, but whom? She spends the movie living out the allegedly universal girl-fantasy of having two awesome guys, one hot and one cool, fight over you.

That's about it, story-wise. In between, Edward gazes at Bella with piercing directness, intoning some version of the line, "Your safety is everything to me." Jacob stares her down with a look that's supposed to be sensual and smoldering, though he really only looks as if he's just swallowed a chipmunk. Meanwhile, his Wolf Pack Buddies, in their human form, galavant barechested through the forest in their cutoff pants, pissed off because they can't find any new Don Ho records to listen to. In CGI-wolf form, they at least have some innate dignity.

To its credit, Eclipse looks better than its direct predecessor. (The DP is Javier Aguirresarobe, who shot The Road.) As in the earlier pictures, we get lots of sweeping, panoramic shots of the Pacific Northwest woods, but here they look particularly crisp and sparkling. In two scenes Edward and Bella loll in a sun-dappled flower-strewn field straight out of a Prince Matchabelli ad. (Edward is careful to stay in the shade, but when the sun hits the angular planes of his face, his telltale vampire diamond-skin shimmers like blingy peach fuzz.) These two sequences are ridiculously beautiful to look at, sublime in their silliness, and they rekindle some of the go-for-broke teen-heartthrob romanticism that Hardwicke's Twilight captured so well. That picture reveled unapologetically in teen girliness: Its intentions were honest and straightforward without seeming mechanized.

But now that we've hit the third picture in the franchise, it's clear the studio behind it, Summit, actually prefers that the movies be programmed and predictable. It also looks as if the strain of following the series template so strictly is beginning to wear on the young actors: It's part of Stewart's style to look a little bored and blasé, but in Eclipse she seems to have completely checked out. When she searches the faces of her two dueling guy pals, wondering which one she loves better, her eyes show little more than an eeny-meeny-miney-moe blankness. And Pattinson appears to have given up altogether, although I don't think he'll let down his adoring audience -- he tries, at least, to look at Stewart as if she were the sun and the moon combined, and his efforts are moderately convincing if you don't look too closely.

But mostly, these two performers seem caught in a pantomime designed to elicit cheers and cooing from its target demographic. Obviously, the Twilight movies attract an audience beyond tween girls, but there's little doubt these movies are tailored specifically to them. That's not a bad thing by itself. What stings is that the movies are made with so little regard for clear storytelling, or even for building a lush, romantic mood. (Filling a movie with brooding lines of dialogue isn't the same thing.) No one is really thinking of the audience here beyond how its members translate into dollar signs.

Many, many girls and young women will see Eclipse and will either love it or like it just fine. Maybe all that matters is that they had a good time -- as I said earlier, they won't be the first kids to have fun while watching junk. Still, they're worthy of something more. Eclipse fulfills its function adequately; if only the bar weren't set so low.