Twilight Tuesday: A total Eclipse of the heart

Twilight Tuesdays is a weekly column in August 2024 where Lisa Laman reviews and breaks down the three Twilight movies she's never seen before Eclipse and the two Breaking Dawn installments. First up, let's go back to summer 2010 with The Twilight Saga: Eclipse...

Summer 2010 was the worst summer moviegoing season in my lifetime. Others look back with reverence on the summertime cinema they consumed at 14 years old. As for me, I can only gaze at summer 2010’s offerings as slim pickings. Sure, this season offered up classics like Toy Story 3, Inception, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I even have a soft spot for Joe Carnahan’s unabashedly silly The A-Team. However, they were sandwiched between a truly dismal line-up of motion pictures that included Iron Man 2, Shrek Forever After, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The Expendables, The Last Airbender, Grown Ups, Jonah Hex, and more.

This summer 2010 slate just makes the initial hyperbolic hatred surrounding the Twilight movies all the more amusing. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (the only Twilight entry to open outside of November) opened over a 4th of July weekend frame dominated by Grown Ups, The Last Airbender, and Knight & Day. I’d handily dub the third Twilight installment superior to all those films! In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Similarly, Eclipse registered as a less painful installment in a truly dreadful moviegoing season. However, not being Florida Georgia Line doesn't suddenly turn you into George Strait. Eclipse was far more bearable than watching Rob Schneider at a water park, but it’s still got some grave flaws of its own.

In the quiet city of Forks, Washington, human Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) are madly in love yet struggle with one deeply universal relationship issue. Bella wants to become a vampire. Edward doesn’t want her to transform into an undead being. Ah, young love. At the same time, a series of murders in Seattle transpire thanks to the nefarious and vengeful Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard). She's creating an army of "newborn" vampires (humans newly turned into vampires) to exact revenge on Edward and Bella. With carnage imminent, not even Edward's super-powered family can protect Bella. These vampires will have to work with their sworn enemies, the werewolves. That's an especially tricky prospect since werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) yearns to win Swan’s heart.

As a society, we now have nearly 15 years of additional Stewart and Pattinson performances to compare to their work in Eclipse and other Twilight movies. That superior subsequent work makes it extra apparent how these two are fulfilling their duties to a tee here. They're expected to fulfill certain broad roles in a mainstream film and they're doing the job.

Stewart has cemented herself as a performer who always keeps you on your toes. Between her clinched line deliveries in Crimes of the Future, tormented work in Spencer, or dark comedy chops in Love Lies Bleeding, Stewart masks versatility beneath an understated exterior. She lures you in with a lived-in quiet demeanor and then surprises you with gifts you never knew she had. There isn’t much range in Stewart’s Eclipse performance, but director David Slade isn’t asking for much variety. This leading lady shows up and knows how to inhabit a Kelly Reichardt, David Cronenberg, or Olivier Assayas movie with utmost dedication. So too does she plunge into melodramatic teenage angst here. Her gift for very precise line deliveries also informs some nice bits of understated longing in her voice-over narration.

Pattinson, meanwhile, has become famous for his very pronounced flourishes. That bleached-blonde hair in Good Time, for example, or his "DELUSIONS!" line delivery in The Devil All The Time, or any iconic moment from The Lighthouse. Unsurprisingly, he fully immerses himself into Edward’s longing gazes or his line deliveries alternating between cold and affectionate. Neither Stewart nor Pattinson are delivering Eclipse performances worthy of their greatest exploits as actors. However, they're also doing exactly what they've been asked to and aren't sleepwalking through their respective roles. There's nary a wink of irony in Stewart and Pattinson's execution of this romance, a harbinger of how much commitment they'd infuse into their subsequent oddball indie roles.

Stewart and Pattinson showing such fascinating flashes of their larger talents is one of Eclipse’s most striking elements. Also standing out, unfortunately, is Slade and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe’s struggles with executing intimate conversation sequences. Early in Eclipse, there’s a lunchroom conversation scene between Edward, Bella, and their High School chums. Instantly, there’s a strangely cramped feeling thanks to the camera rarely pulling back to capture more than two characters in one shot. Then, suddenly, vampires Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) and Alice (Ashley Greene) just...appear at the table. It’s genuinely disorienting at the moment, I initially thought they were at a separate spot in the lunchroom! Without any wider shots to reinforce the geography of this table, simple things like character entrances become far too distracting.

Later on, Rosalie Hale (Nikki Reed) tells Bella how she turned into a vampire. It's a tragic saga involving her sexual abuse at the hands of a group of men centuries earlier. Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay comes up with a truly memorable image to cap off this sequence with Rosalie, blood smeared on her lips, in a wedding dress bursting open the door of a hotel room belonging to the last of her attackers. Unfortunately, this scene’s weighed down by a “tell, don’t show” problem that plagues too much of Eclipse. Hale’s narration does nothing but hammer home the obvious. Just letting a vampire version of “Goodbye Earl” transpire without any accompanying voice-over would’ve been divine.

Much like with its reliance on overly tight close-up shots, though, Eclipse has a bad habit of spoon-feeding its audience. Director David Slade also turns out to be a mixed blessing for the proceedings. This horror movie veteran (who directed the vampire movie 30 Days of Night just before Eclipse) lends moody lighting and some palpable danger to sequences depicting Victoria’s newborn army coming to terms with their powers in some Seattle warehouse. When he really lets his theatricality fly, Eclipse also delivers some enjoyably bombastic images. Rosalie in that wedding dress is a hoot, ditto the sight of several evil vampires emerging from a lake.

However, despite being a future veteran director of the deeply homoerotic and horny TV show Hannibal, Slade’s execution of intimate romantic scenes is rudimentary. Despite playful scripted moments like Jacob informing Edward “let’s face it, I’m hotter than you”, Slade’s camerawork remains straightforward. Even a unique scenario like confining the three leads to a tent at night doesn’t spur inspired staging. The same medium-shots and cramped images dominate this exchange just as they do the rest of the movie.

Is this a product of Eclipse wanting to showcase a “reverent” attitude towards the books? Indulging in more dynamic camerawork and angles may have been viewed as potentially alienating to some Twihards. Perhaps it’s a consequence of Slade having more experience with graphically violent horror than romantic dramas? More likely, Eclipse is just following the cinematography norms of late 2000s/early 2010s blockbuster fare. These were films that dialed down on-screen colors in favor of shaky-cam, tight framing, and “gritty realism”. Nobody could evade this problem, not even magical werewolves and vampires. Whatever the reason, the unimaginative framing of Bella, Edward, and Jacob’s love triangle left me frustrated.

A didactic script and leaning the love triangle on Lautner’s underwhelming performance automatically undercuts how high Eclipse can fly. Still, watching the feature as a 28-year-old, I could genuinely see why this motion picture resonated so well with its target demo back in the day. The Twilight movies work as a wish-fulfillment cinema for teenage girls. They're certainly less aggressive in that goal than, say, the Michael Bay Transformers movies functioning as wish-fulfillment cinema for teenage cis-het boys.

An opening scene of Bella and Edward cuddling in the flowers expressing their love for each other crystallizes this wish-fulfillment quality. For younger viewers grappling with puberty-induced self-hatred and concerns if anyone will ever love them, here’s a movie presenting an “everyday” teenage girl that’s won over someone not just special but supernatural. Eclipse depicts that romance not as burgeoning, but a lived-in part of reality. Bella and Edward are so comfortable with each other now that they lie amongst the flowers stroking each other’s hair. I'm a lesbian perplexed over how anyone could be attracted to men. Yet even I can see the appeal of that wish-fulfillment fantasy.

That opening sequence also got me thinking about Twilight as a last big gasp for massive romantic American movies. Once the Twilight saga wrapped up, horniness and romance in motion pictures largely dried up. That troubling trend has only recently begun getting reversed (and even then it’s mostly been confined to the indie space). A combination of factors led to that dilution of sex in American cinema. However, I do wonder if part of it was the (completely justifiable and understandable) grievances about perceived “creepiness” in the Edward/Bella dynamic. Worried about mimicking those missteps, Hollywood studios opted to not engage in similar material again.

That would be a phenomenon mimicking how major Hollywood studios have handled gay representation in the last decade. Entities like Warner Bros. and Disney know they can't release movies where people yell gay slurs or say "that's so gay" anymore, that was never cool. However, these studios also don't want to alienate the money of homophobic moviegoers. The solution? Rather than improve on queer archetypes of the past, characters have largely vanished entirely from mainstream cinema. That approach appears to parallel how Hollywood has tackled romance and horniness in the last decade. Instead of improving on qualms with cinematic relationships like the Edward/Bella romance, Hollywood just gave up entirely. After all, sex on-screen inevitably offends those same moviegoers who hate gays or mouthy women in their movies. We must always defer to them.

Eclipse, like its Twilight brethren, functions as a “last hurrah” for big movies focused on people locked in longing gazes. Even so, this franchise also reflects the very restrictive concept of romance that dominates American cinema. Even in a fantasy saga starring werewolves and vampires, Twilight can’t conceive of sex occurring outside of marriage. Sacred heteronormative traditions regarding marriage as the most important thing in life are still emphasized here. Romantic longing used to be more common in movies, but it was certainly a specific strain of romantic longing. God help any characters who strayed from it, especially more sexually active women.

Eclipse and the other Twilight movies are far from alone in adhering to these rigid romantic cinema norms, of course. This franchise being one of the few romance-heavy blockbuster sagas of the last 20 years, though, makes it an especially rich place to discuss those standards.

Once Eclipse’s final moments roll around, it’s clear where the first of those Breaking Dawn movies are going: a wedding. Quick, call the Muppets, “somebody’s getting married!” As Edward and Bella exchange wry quips about how the former character will now have to tell Bella’s dad about their impending union, I found myself contemplating what I liked about Eclipse. The werewolf/vampire fight scenes are bit gnarlier than expected. Who knew these vampires apparently shatter like broken statues or Eric Andre’s laptop when they lose limbs! It's also commendable how deeply committed these performers are to this material. Whenever Eclipse gets its freaky on, like with that wedding dress slaughter, the proceedings suddenly grow an irresistible campy groove.

The flaws here, namely the bog-standard visuals and uninvolving plot, didn’t convert me into a late-bloomer Twihard. Especially disappointing was the soundtrack, I wanted more ridiculous and flowery needle drops! Remember the bombastic and distinctly 2003 “Wake Me Up Inside” music cue in Daredevil? That’s what I wanted here! This is a movie with tunes from Florence + the Machine, The Black Keys, Muse, and other notable bands. Let the music be pronounced and super overt, not just something occuring in the background. Even with that wasted sonic potential, this installment’s melodrama and romantic yearning did make me understand how this would resonate with its target back in 2010. At least it does what it says on the tin. For that, Eclipse automatically soars past much worse summer 2010 movies like Grown Ups and The Last Airbender.

One last thing before we wrap up this Twilight Tuesdays installment: I don’t know how this saga ends beyond knowing one especially famous Breaking Dawn – Part Two set piece. However, I presume this story must end with Edward and Jacob boning, right? The enemies-to-lovers arc there seems so obvious, especially with how they keep touching each other in “anger” in Eclipse. Surely these final films will deliver some Edward/Jacob makeout action. We'll all get to see Jacob holding on tight to Edward’s “spider monkey". This will free up Bella and Jessica (Anna Kendrick) to bone before they open a muffin shop together in Seattle. That feels like the only logical conclusion to this saga. If it’s not, well, hey, we can fix that. After all, filmmakers can CG Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi decades later. Surely modern technology can green-screen in Edward and Jacob going all Challengers in Breaking Dawn!