Twilight Saga: Eclipse is a compelling sequel certain to enthrall die-hard fans.
Now a historical movie franchise breaking box office records worldwide like its predecessors Twilight and New Moon, this third installment clearly marathons every opportunity to please fans. While they ultimately deserve more, this movie successfully utilizes the right blood type to fuel all its bankable possibilities. And whatever critics and non-fans say, its hard-core followers ultimately back up this romantic fantasy flick as an ultimate cash cow.
Eclipse is dull, boring, and overly dramatic; unless the viewer finds it therapeutic, entertaining, or orgasmic to see perfectly pale and powerful vampires and perfectly chiseled, shirtless werewolves making a regular girl happy on the big screen. If just for those, this movie is a sure winner. The movie marathons to as much close-ups and beauty shots while the actors and actresses try to put life to their clichéd lines. Add up some action to boost things up in between the many drags, and that’s about it.
Its vampire boy-meets-ordinary girl-meets werewolf boy story can already be effectively told in a short movie, but of course, the studio needs to prolong it as much as it can. To keep up with the feature-length movie requirement, Eclipse incorporates many visceral set pieces, stylistic flashbacks, and impassioned sentiments to keep the viewers hanging on to its swoony tale of forbidden love.
There’s no middle ground with the Twilight Saga. Either the viewer surrenders to the value of this movie version of the Stephenie Meyer bestseller or the viewer walks out feeling lifeless in disappointment. One thing is for sure, this film confidently provides the commercial requirements to make fans satisfied.
In its own mediocre level, Eclipse’s good points are its pretty good make-up, atmospheric feel, and art direction setting the mood for a sort of emotional pornography for teenagers. The “melodramatic crush factor” works well for those craving for such inner adolescent fantasies. The marketing strategy establishing the vampire-wolf division “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob,” along with the “in-Bella’s shoes” girl fantasies, is developed pretty well throughout the movie. It validates its teen-friendly demeanor where words overcome sexual urges and where fight scenes are meant for viewers who are only concerned about the protagonists winning and looking so cool with it.
Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen, and Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black embrace their own sense of camp in this movie about teenage uncertainty, emotional highs and lows, and impassioned teenage love. It is not the stunning locations, special effects, or the plot that “Twilighters” will keep in mind, it’s the characters and their relationships that they shall remember.
Director David Slade taps into what Twilight fans want. He keeps it cold and lifeless in a way that the ultimate teenage fantasies about the characters become the full movie. The adolescents and the adolescents at heart don’t mind how characters shamelessly have their buttons pushed as long as they can relate to these characters’ own personal hurdles.
Eclipse manages to create a teen drama effectively utilizing its cheesy special effects to stage chaste, romantic tensions against the many scenic backdrops. It demonstrates adolescent longing and primal physical confrontations where the ultimate damsel in distress gets saved by not one but two “prince charmings,” not to mention their whole clans helping out.
For those seeking for a quality film offer, this 124-minute movie about convoluted passions and hormonal outrage cries out for life. It seeks for a life-saving blood transfusion. It is like watching two lovers looking at each other’s eyes and feeling the ultimate magic of being in love; while anyone not relating to it would most likely feel bored or apathetic.
With fans undoubtedly willing to get bitten, this third chapter of the Twilight Saga remains foremost a flick for devotees. Given the strength of this franchise, the least non-fans can wish for is for the next chapter/s to take the challenge of better quality over the shallowness of its comfort zone. If it continues to be this programmed and predictable, the only thing to remember it by is that it sucks the blood out of pop culture; while it leaves everybody else outside dead cold.
