The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (C)

With the pretty visuals, surprisingly funny moments, and so many characters you barely notice that nothing happens in the whole movie. Nothing can excuse that anti-climactic ending, though.

When we last saw the Twilight Universe, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) had chosen the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) over the werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) and had nearly died giving birth to a half-human/half-vampire child named Renesme (MacKenzie Foy), but had been revived as a vampire. Breaking Dawn Part 2 begins with Bella’s first hunt. For those unaware, Edward and his family are rare “vegetarian vampires” who through incredible restraint practiced for decades have been able to live off the blood of animals rather than that of humans. Bella starts out stalking a deer, but her superhuman sense of smell alerts her to a mildly injured mountain climber nearby. Bella is consumed with the thirst for blood and charges off to feast on the unfortunate adventurer. Edward runs after her, grabs her arm, and says “don’t do it--you can control yourself.” Bella apologizes and goes and eats a puma instead. One scene later, Edward’s mother remarks that since some vampires have additional super-powers (Edward, for example, can read minds), Bella must have the ability to exercise great self-control and it is thus quite easy for her to avoid killing humans. And that plot thread, which had been built up for five two-hour movies, is solved.

For the remainder of the movie, Emmy-winner Melissa Rosenberg (Dexter) desperately tries to form some semblance of a story. Last year, I wrote that the previously laughable Twilight franchise had produced a true gem with Breaking Dawn Part 1, a movie I put on my top ten list of 2011. Now, we see the negative effects of putting all the best parts of the final Twilight book in one movie and then devoting another to tying up loose ends.
This movie tackles the interesting topic of the Voltury, the royalty of the vampire world that offered Edward membership back in New Moon. Concerned with the growing power of vegetarian vampires and Renesme, which they (falsely) believe is a vampirized child, the Voltury decide to go to the Cullens’ home in Forks, Washington and kill them. This would make for an interesting movie, except for the fact that Stephanie Meyers--who wrote the books--didn’t really spend much time telling it. Rosenberg frequently starts interesting plot-lines and gives an entertaining fight scene, but in the end must avoid telling a satisfying ending since she has to be faithful to the source material. My guess is that both Meyer and Twilight distributor Summit want to save the inevitable conflict between the Voltury and the Cullens for a Renesme franchise, which would be fine except for the fact that it was the plotline advertised for this movie.

The stories of Bella, Jacob, and Edward all seem told, so little time is devoted to character development for them (probably a good thing, since none of those characters were remotely interesting). Instead, the trio takes a backseat to about twenty vampires new to the franchise (not an exaggeration). These new bloodsuckers have allied with the Cullens against the Voltury for various reasons. The most interesting of these are Casey Labow’s Kate, who can fire blasts of electricity from her palms, and Lee Pace’s Garret, a non-vegetarian vampire who fought valiantly for the Americans in the War of 1812. Of course, there are also some stupid characters that shouldn’t be included, first and foremost being Patrick Brennan’s Irish vampire Liam, who dressed like a leprechaun. I was most intrigued by how the Egyptian clan of vampires hides the universal vampire trait of sparkling in the sunlight in their sunny homeland (the past four movies insist that by living in the perpetually cloudy Washington mountains the Cullens avoid notice).

In this movie, like the others, there is the disturbing element of how unconcerned the Cullens seem to be with the existence of the non-vegetarian vampires, which are effectively super-powered serial killers. Here they actually ally with a bunch of them, but never seem remotely conflicted if perhaps with their extraordinary super-powers and vast knowledge of vampires they should try to stop them. The earlier movies stated that vampires could not battle each other since the Voltury forbade it, but seeing as current circumstances have brought the Voltury and the Cullens to war it seems that should be a non-issue now.
Director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) has done a great job of taking away the dumbest elements from the earlier movies. The acting is better (Stewart has greatly improved since she started the series), the scenes are much quicker and concise, the make-up is exponentially superior, and cinematography (by Pan’s Labyrinth’s Guillermo Navarro) is gorgeous. Condon can’t undo the appearances of everything in the early movies, be he chooses to frequently ignore the effect of sunlight on vampire skin, since Twilight Director Catherine Hardwicke made the sparkling thing look so stupid; he also uses ample speed ramping and slow-motion to hide the cheesiness of the “vampire super-speed” special effect used by Hardwicke.

The best element is Billy Burke (TV’s Revolution) as Charlie, Bella’s police officer father. Burke has always brought incredible depth to his role, and here Rosenberg takes the most amounts of liberties with Meyer’s book in order to give Burke the opportunity to make his scenes both funnier and more in depth. The scene where Jacob reveals his werewolf ability to Charlie could be the most humorous I’ve seen this year, and the moment where Charlie awkwardly attends a Christmas party where every other attendee is aware of the vampire conspiracy (Bella refuses to tell him) is one of the series’ most heart-felt. He can’t save the movie, though.
Breaking Dawn Part 2 is watchable, but the lack of a plot makes it a bit of a letdown.