Friday Review-Breaking Dawn (2012)

Boy howdy, I am not sure I am ready to review this last installment in the Twilight extravaganza. So far the Twilight movies have been cheesy at the best of times, and horrible, over the top, badly acted/written/directed at the worst of times. That said, Breaking Dawn could have been worse, and honestly the crew didn't have a whole lot to work with here. Breaking Dawn finally sees Edward and Bella get married, do the nasty, get pregnant and pop out the vampire baby within the span of a few months. Bella is so frail and weak, as usual, that she can not survive the baby's growth and birth which leads to Bella drinking blood milkshakes and finally giving birth and being turned into a vampire herself. Meanwhile the werewolves bitch and moan and pine for lovers lost and take their shirts off and that's about it. All of this is stretched into a 2 hour extravaganza of longing looks, the same sort of quasi-indie music that graced the past three films and symbolic chess boards. Breaking Dawn isn't the worst (it might even be the best) of the series and it certainly is bombastic and melodramatic enough that it seems intentional. The fairy tale wedding, honeymoon and marital life at the Cullen house is all beautifully done, everything in subtle shades of brown, beige and taupe which gives in an otherworldly feel.  Bella looks suitably emaciated and grey as the vampire baby devours her from the inside out. And yet Breaking Dawn is filled with the kind of material that, let's just say, I wouldn't want my teenage daughters seeing, and I don't refer to the soft-core sex scene. Bella is an insufferable whiner who can't even muster a smile for her own wedding, never mind that she instantly gets pregnant since, even in this series which makes abstinence it's mantra, no one thought to talk about birth control. To make matters worse Bella keeps her ex-boyfriend and sometimes love interest, Jacob, around because it makes her happy. If Bella were a man who happily kept his wife and girlfriend in the same house, this would be lambasted by critics and parents but since it's poor little Kristen Stewart, no one seems to mind. Edward even approaches Jacob and asks him to maybe-possibly sex Bella up. Meanwhile in wolf territory, Stephenie Meyer's distaste for Aboriginal people gives us lots of scenes of Jacob being rejected and moping about it, Leah being rejected and moping about it, discord in the tribe and bad CGI. As this movie slogs on till it's gory, seizure inducing conclusion the morals become so convoluted you wonder how any parent forked over $10 to their teenage daughters to go see this. The birth scene, which must have filled writers and producers with dread, sees Edward forcibly ripping the baby out of Bella WITH HIS TEETH while she screams bloody murder, and Rosalie (who, thankfully, was turned into a kinder, gentler, less-of-a-bitch Rosalie than in the book) scooping up the three month old newborn. Then Edward stabs Bella with a giant needle filled with his venom and proceeds to bite her. I can only imagine what psychologists would have to say about this. Anyway, Jacob 'imprints' on the baby which, I shudder to describe, means that he has fallen in love with her and will take on any role in her life until she is a suitable age for sexing up. This kindly gives everyone a way out of the awkward love triangle, except for the poor creeped out audience. In any case, Bella FINALLY gets to become a beautiful vampire and we get to wait till next year to FINALLY finish the Twilight series, once and for all.