The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012)
The most interesting part of the promotional material for Breaking Dawn: Part 2, i.e. the part that didn't show fairly bland, almost indistiguishable images of the cast members, showed Kristen Stewart in the role of the protagonist Bella with deep red-coloured eyes, now looking like a proper blood-lusting vampire. However, there were some other loose ends left over from Part 1 that we might be less keen to revisit.
During the last movie Bella's pregnancy was seen as a threat by the werewolves, so wolf-boy Jacob solves this by 'imprinting' himself on her new-born baby. Apparently imprinting for werewolves means that they've chosen someone as their life partner. It produces a permanent bond between them and that person. Naturally the idea of him imprinting onto a newborn baby is pretty twisted. What I hadn't really thought about before though was that at the end of the last movie Bella still had not been told about this. She'd only just opened her eyes after her difficult childbirth when the previous movie finished.
When she finds out that Jacob has imprinted on her daughter, she naturally goes ape-sh*t. Though actually she gets rather upset over something random. Turns out that Jacob has been called her daughter "Nessy". This was a nickname since the daughter was rather awkwardly named "Renesme" (a combination of Rene and Esme). Bella gets extremely upset with this nickname because she thinks it is a reference to the Loch Ness Monster. The thing is, unlike Renesme, Nessy is actually a real name. It's derived from the Greek names Agnes and Vanessa. Isn't Bella supposed to be smart? I suppose your characters are only as smart as their writers.
As for Bella, the blood-lusting vampire, this is initially pretty impressive. Bella goes out on the hunt and does some pretty cool superhuman forest jumping. None of it lasts remotely long enough. We see her spot a human on a cliff-face and very nearly decide to kill him, but she stops herself. The suggestion in the promotional material that her blood-lust might be an issue turns out to come to nothing. Not only is this the last time that blood-lust from Bella is even referenced, but it's also the last time we even see her hunting animals. That side of the story is finished up very quickly. Not long after that, the focus on Bella's new odd behaviour as a vampire is also suddenly ignored. She apparently has trouble staying still or walking like a normal human because she constantly wants to use her super vampire speed. That was quite a nice idea, but it's not long before the film has moved on and no longer considers this sort of detail important.
We have a brief appearance from Bella's father Charlie, played by Billy Burke. Burke's appearances have generally been a highlight of this series since he seems to be the only person with any dramatic chemistry with Kristen Stewart. This is the first film where his appearance wasn't really a highlight. I suppose he'd always been able to ground the film in a little more reality, but here surrounded by vampires with Bella lying about her newfound vampirism, there's none of the warmth we'd normally expect between them. This is another element that really should have been expanded on further and it feels strange that the writers (whether Stephanie Meyer, the author, or Melissa Rosenberg, who wrote the screenplay) just don't seem to care about such an important element of these stories. Happily ditching Charlie as soon as possible so they can move onto their slow monotonous "a final battle scene is coming!" section of the plot.
Just as the werewolves were frightened about a vampire birth before, this time the vampires are worried about it. It seems that Volturi are concerned this time. This is the same Volturi vampire elite group who are frightened of vampires being revealed to the world and yet wear ridiculous cloaks and outdated clothes that seem to scream "I am a vampire" to everyone who sees them. Apparently they're concerned that Renesme might be a girl who has been turned vampire while very young. It seems that there was once an issue with this in the past, where young children with no sense of self control started biting all the humans, messing up the food supply by making more vampires yet leaving very few humans to feed from.
There's some hint that there might be politics involved here, since the Volturi might be less interested in stopping a young vampire girl as they are in capturing Alice, the vampire who can see into the future. Why Alice's power is so important, is not really so obvious. She's never been quite certain about what will happen in the future. She just appears to have a better predictive ability than normal.
Considering that all vampires seem to have special fancy abilities it's surprising how little we've seen of this in previous movies. We have a whole bunch of people turning up to help the Cullens with all sorts of special vampire abilities. We now see vampires who can produce an electric current to incapacitate enemies and a vampire who can control the elements, rather than the boring psychic powers we've previously been expected to care about. Also Bella turns out to have the power to block other vampire powers which seems likely to become useful if the Volturi attack.
Another bit of internal vampire politics, this time even less relevant to the story in the long run, is the arrival of two particular uninvited guests who are only there because they WANT a confrontation with the Volturi and are prepared to latch onto any conflict with the Volturi that they can. Once again, this could have been an interesting element if it had any real impact on the plot.
With the Volturi completely absent at this stage, this part of the film is a lot less interesting than the above descriptions might make it sound. Eventually though, the Volturi DO arrive and we DO get the final battle scene we've been waiting for. While not as exciting as the fight in the third movie, Twilight Eclipse, it is pretty brutal all the same. Still, in Eclipse we were thoroughly introduced to the characters involved in the end conflict over the course of the film with some interesting backstory and character motivations, rather than simply that different people have different powers. Eclipse was actually a long movie, but you wouldn't know by how interminably the film progresses.
Breaking Dawn Part 2's final battle scene features several cases of heads being ripped off. However, in spite of the brutality of this final conflict, a plot contrivance somehow manages to remove all weight to anything that happens in the film. (Yes even deaths of major characters.) There's a massive deus ex machina ending which completely undoes all consequences. This is the final movie in the entire Twilight series and, perhaps I was naive, I thought there'd be a more solid finale than this. When everything wraps up, I don't feel like the story is really over and if they hadn't marketed this as the end of the series, I think they could quite easily have just carried on making movies. (After all, are the Twilight fans really going to complain?) I mean just imagine, a Twilight movie that isn't bound by what Stephanie Meyer wrote? Surely it can only be an improvement? (Unless E.L. James is on board. *gulp!*) Perhaps get Cronenberg to get involved in the twisted vampiric body horror stuff finally? No?
Still, the whole Twilight movie series is over and it's probably for the best. Far from being one of the better movies, overall I didn't find this any better than the last one. Asides from the brief scenes of Bella hunting at the beginning and the heads getting lopped off during the final battle scene, this was mostly just dull.
One last thing I feel I ought to mention is the addition of Cameron Bright ("Thank You For Smoking", "Ultraviolet", "Birth") to the Volturi. He joins Dakota Fanning as another extremely talented child actor (well, actually I suppose they're probably 'young adults' by now) who could really be doing much more interesting work. Let's hope that now this series is over they can go on to have larger parts where they are actually expected to speak lines rather than to simply stare coldly at people.
D+
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If you are interested to know what I thought about the other films I previously posted a spoiler-filled review of the first three along with my review of the fourth movie here.