The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1

The Bella of the ball has gone and dropped it, now she's ballooning, and it looks as if she might split, is she carrying a curse, that will smash the dream and burst, or will the wounds reseal, re-knit and close the slit.

It's a shame they didn't turn it into three, two hour films of nothing much would be such glee, we could watch them painting walls, watch them dry, then watch leaves fall, while under moonlight watch them swimming in the sea.

Breaking Yawn!

I like twilight. i wouldn't say i LOVE it, but i found the books to be amusing, warm and a good time waster. The movies seem to be more about capitalising on funds rather than delivering a decent plot.

i've never been a fan of Kristin Stewart (insipid droning teenager that she is in all of the movieS) but she actually appears to present somewhat of a decent acting skill in this movie, whereas cold, boring edward (who in the books was a heart-throb) is just as terribly pathetic as he was in the previous movies. The man that has stolen the show, taylor lautner, since he took his shirt off in the second movie was pushed into the background a little bit in this movie, which i think was the worst thing they could have done. but, in the same token, they had to do as its a love story between edward and bella, not bella and jacob. I'm just a little disappointed by the way they've dragged this on. but i was disappointed by the books towards the end too.

We took our whole office at the penrith professionals and there were mixed reviews. The oldies hated it, the middle agers (who knew the basic plot line of the movie) found it a nice romance but fairly boring and the young girls loved it for the sheer fact it was twilight.

I wouldn't see it again, thats for sure.

I am neither a Twilight fan or a Twilight detractor. This said, I am indifferent to the franchise. As far as the movies, I still think, coming from someone whose knowledge of the books only comes from my sister being a fan and me reading a chapter of one and putting it down, that the best is Eclipse(not saying much) and New Moon the worst. But that is not a consolation really. Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is not quite among the worst of the year and nowhere near among the worst ever, however it suffers from some major problems that I will get to later in the review.

So what was it that got me seeing Breaking Dawn: Part 1 in the first place? The answer was its director, Bill Condon. I am familiar with his previous films and find him a promising director and writer, finding his films well written, observed and acted. Gods and Monsters is amazing and one of my favourites, Kinsey was interesting and Dreamgirls elevated by the soundtrack and cast was quite decent. Did Condon do a good job directing? For me, I am not sure. I'd say of the four Twilight movies so far Breaking Dawn: Part 1 has the most cinematic feel to it, on the other hand there is not much here that made Condon's previous films so good and I'd go as far to say it is the film of his that engaged me the least.

Are there any redeeming qualities to this instalment? I think so actually. Although there are moments of sloppy editing, I did like the look of the film. At some points it was quite Gothic, and at others it had either an evergreen or autumnal feel to it. The scenery often does look stunning, the effects are okay I guess and the cinematography especially with the close-ups of the back of the wedding dress and the final shot is some of the best of the franchise in my opinion.I also liked Carter Burwell's score. I like Burwell a lot, his music has a hypnotic and quite hauntingly beautiful quality to it. For my tastes though some of the pop tunes are on the insipid side, however the score itself was pleasant with a lot of what I like about Burwell evident.

Much has been said about the sex scene. In all honesty I was expecting it to be of hilariously cheesy quality, but somehow Condon brought a little more subtlety than I was expecting. The last thirty minutes was perhaps the most exciting Breaking Dawn: Part 1 got, as some of does have purpose and intensity, which was something that the first half of the film did not have.There are also two good performances, Billy Burke and Michael Sheen, the latter being another point of interest. Burke as always is amusing with some of the better lines of the film(though is that saying much do you think?), while Sheen, ever the great actor, adopts a menace and magnetism as Aro without overdoing it too much. Ashley Greene is also quite good, if not great.

I have to say I still don't think much of the acting of the central trio. Kristen Stewart is much better than she is in New Moon, with much less of the moping and dead pauses, but some of her line delivery is still awkward and her facial expressions for my tastes are lifeless. It doesn't help though that Bella is a rather dull character.Robert Pattinson has more to do than he did in New Moon and is less hammy than in the first film(the looking into the camera moments brought moments of unintentional laughter when I first went to see Twilight when it came out). As a matter of fact this is perhaps his best performance of the series and he is certainly the best of the central trio, but like Stewart some of the line delivery could've been more inspired.

Taylor Lautner on the other hand is getting worse and worse. He is hunky to be sure, but does that alone make you a good actor? Not to me. I will give credit and say he is better than he was in this year's Abduction, where both the film and performance were awful, but the more dramatic moments from him felt forced and overplayed, and throughout there was a very stilted nature about him. A lot of the problem is to do with the writing. The dialogue in the Twilight franchise never was particularly good, saying this though in terms of written quality this is Twilight at its most banal, its most clunky and its most cheesy. The characters are clichéd and underdeveloped too, and at the end of the day you don't care for anybody. Oh, and the talking wolves were poorly done and unintentionally funny.

The story is very bland and unengaging, not to mention thin structurally and in content. The whole of the first half reads little more than ponderous melodrama. Was the wedding lavish? Yes it was. But it was also plodding and over-extended. The second half fares better, still with the clunky dialogue, uneven acting and cheesy, underdeveloped plot points and characterisations, but as I said the last thirty minutes or so serves as the highlight of the film. But for me what killed the film was the pace. Mind you, I have seen movies with slow pacing, but they are often paced deliberately and with strong meanings, great acting and dialogue and identifiable characters. With little of that here, Breaking Dawn: Part 1 not only is dull and plodding but also uninteresting and without bite.

Overall, despite my admiration for Condon and Sheen, this didn't work. The ending is highly suggestive of a continuation, which I understand is happening. If so, I do hope it will be better than this. 4/10 Bethany Cox

There is not much happening altogether in this film. They put way too much focus on the wedding and the honeymoon, thus wasting precious time. But I guess all those teenage girl fans wanted a full portrayal of the big romantic wedding.

In all of the previous films, I liked the acting of most of the cast a lot. But in this film, everyone except Bella, Edward & Jacob is marginalised to such an extent that there cannot be much said about them. As an audience you just don't get to see enough of any of them to really develop a connection with or care about them.

Altogether this is an OK addition to the franchise, by no means worse than the disappointing/confusing 2nd or 3rd films. I assume I will give this film either a 5 or a 6 (out of 10), but I think I will withhold my final vote until I have seen part 2. I know some might say that they are released as separate films and therefore should be treated as such, but as the original book is ripped into two halves here, I think it is fair to reserve the final judgement until I have seen the two films in conjunction (seeing that, as I haven't read the books, I will need to have seen both films in order to make sense of it all).

Victoria is dead, there is no longer any threat to Bella. So she and Edward get married, while on their honeymoon they do the dirty deed and oops, Bella gets pregnant. Vampire pregnant, which means the fetus is growing at 5 times the normal rate and is killing her from within. The wolf clan cannot have this, as it breaks their treaty somehow and they come to kill the baby. Now Jacob must team up with the people he hates, the Cullens, in order to protect Bella.

While this premise does sound interesting, it's a shame that the producers wanted to milk this poorly conceived franchise for every penny they can get. Instead of making one film, they split the story into two and Breaking Dawn Part 1 clearly suffers from over stuffing and filler. Nothing happens until the last twenty minutes of the film. We know they get married, we know they have sex and we know she gets pregnant. It takes way too long to get these plot points across. The wedding, the honeymoon and the pregnancy could have all happened in the first 30 minutes, but it's instead stretched to an obscene length.

Books have more room to breath. The world is created an the writer has hundreds of pages to tell their story. Films don't have this luxury, so when a film comes out based on a book, you need to chop out the stuff that's simply not needed or wouldn't translate well to the screen. Since the people behind this film want to make more money, they split the last film into two. WB did the same for Harry Potter, but I can forgive them because there is actual story to tell in that film, here there is nothing. She doesn't get pregnant until 50 minutes into the film. Which means we are stuck with boring characters either being jealous of what others have (Jacob) or two people having sex over and over (Edward/Bella). The amount of time that was dedicated to the honeymoon is insane. What should have been a ten minute sequence, at most, takes about 30 minutes of screen time.

Once Bella starts dying, the film tries to get into motion, but it's too late. When she goes into labor, that's when something finally interesting happens and the rest of the film makes for some of the most thrilling moments in the entire series. A standoff between the Cullens and the wolves is finally shown here, something that people have been waiting for since the first film. The tension between the two families finally explodes. This is exciting stuff, this is what people have been waiting for, but the film still suffers from bad CGI work when humans interact with the wolves. So the fight sequences, as exciting as they are, never really reach their full potential.

The final frame of the film is so obvious half way through that I actually chuckled to myself when it happened. I still can't shake the feeling that the conflict of the whole series finished with Eclipse and what we have left is an overstretched denouement. Am I excited for the next film? Not really. Half the job of Part 1 is to get you excited for the next, this film fails horribly at that. What's left to happen? An after the credits sequences is shown where we are given a glimpse of what to expect, but I'm too far drawn away from the conflict by that point.

Breaking Dawn is not the worst in the series, but clearly not the best. Had the film been one piece instead of two, then it would have been exciting. The simple fact that it drags on for so long is proof that splitting the film in two was a mistake, creatively. Financially, it's smart. Because young teenage girls will flock to anything, case in point -- this entire series.