The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1





Directed By: Bill Condon

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner

I always try to see the best in movies, but sometimes films are just so crappy that they're downright nightmarish.  In my first official review of a Twilight film, I wanted to give a decent review.  I wanted to be nice and not piss off those diehard Twilight fans, but the temptation to trash this crappy film is just too great.  The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 has quickly become one of those nightmarishly horrible films for me, and I'm going to tell you exactly why.

Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) finally tie the knot.  At their wedding, there is naturally some Cullen family drama, but otherwise all things go well.  Edward even secretly brings Jacob (Taylor Lautner) to the wedding so that he can have a moment with Bella.  Things go awry, however, when Edward and Bella decide to delay turning Bella into a vampire to try to have a "normal" honeymoon.  They consummate their marriage, and a human Bella discovers that she's pregnant with her vampire husband's child.  In this unprecedented pregnancy, Bella fights for her life because the fetus is not compatible with her body.  Meanwhile, Jacob's Quileute wolf pack wants to eliminate any threat posed by Bella and her unborn child, and Jacob must choose his allegiances.

While the Twilight movies are technically fantasy romance films, they've got vampires and werewolves.  With them, there's always plenty of action except for in this film.  There is only one fight between the bloodsuckers and the night howlers at the end of the film, and this little squabble is not worth the price of admission.  This lack of action highlights two big issues with the film.  Director Bill Condon has become too reliant on the story in this flick, and the final story should have never been stretched out to two films.

How do you go from writing and directing phenomenal films like Chicago and Dreamgirls to directing the final installments of the Twilight series?  Bill Condon has lost quite a few points for getting involved with this series.  By helming the two-part finale, Condon found a way to make the Twilight films even more awful.  I didn't think that was possible.  Unlike J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn is not a rich enough text to adapt into two films.  There's not enough action or layered storytelling.  Because of this, Bill Condon has to rely on the acting talents of Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner to carry the film.  If these notoriously terrible actors have any talent at all, it's not enough to carry this big budget soap opera for a full two hours.

On my way home from the theater, I passed a sobriety checkpoint where police officers were making sure that there were no drunk drivers on the road.  Coming from Twilight, I'm a very lucky man that I went to a theater that didn't have a bar.  This film is so awful that it utterly fails the Sobriety Test.  The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 gets a 0.12% rating only because that's the maximum BAC on the Sobriety Test scale.  If you dare waste your time, you will need some flaming jäger bombs to get through this one.