The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1 premiered on Nov. 18 and ended the year and a half wait, which had fans anxiously anticipating what would happen to the breathtaking romance of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Calling Breaking Dawn: Part 1 the best Twilight film to date is not exactly high praise, but it is a far better improvement compared to the last three movies of the series. Breaking Dawn: Part 1 is not quite as accessible to casual moviegoers, as it does depend on the viewer having followed the plot thus far. This being said, one would expect all of the Twilight fans to absolutely love the film. Instead it has fans divided, there are plenty of fans who absolutely adore the movie, feeling that director Bill Condon captured all the breadth of the action and emotion from the book, while there are others who did not like it at all, feeling that aside from the wedding, the movie was cold-hearted, lifeless (no pun intended) and failed to mine all the dramatic potential of the symbolic implications of immortality.
The biggest surprise was the very unexpected humor that comes up from time to time throughout the movie, in contrast to the serious atmosphere that is constant through most of the movie.
The long-awaited wedding of Bella Swan and her cold-blooded hottie, Edward Cullen is probably one of the few scenes that had fans in awe. Stewart, who is now a far better actress than she was in the first movie, captures Bella’s anxiety as she is walking down the aisle. The wedding scene is so extravagant, romantic and heartfelt as Edward and Bella say their vows, with a little “till death do us part” irony. The honeymoon scene was every bit luxurious and exotic as Stephenie Meyer depicted it in the book.
The film really takes off when Bella’s pregnancy kicks in and has her clinging to her life while trying to keep her baby. Once Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) finds out about the pregnancy he is furious and wants to destroy the baby in order to keep Bella alive. This is also when Condon shows off with the special effects more than he had already done before this point in the movie.
The other Twilight movies have amply demonstrated that shooting the action in drab, straightforward fashion just is not attention grabbing. This may be the #1 reason why Condon goes crazy with the special effects.
There are dream sequences, hallucinations, micro close-ups of vampirized veins crystallizing inside the body, werewolf-vision, a giant cake made of corpses, and more blood than in the other three movies put together. Condon was also able to deliver the birth scene very precisely, creating wild, shocking and very bloody imagery.
For the Twilight fans claiming that the series is better than the Harry Potter series, they should stop, look at the big picture and be reasonable on this one. Although, this is just based on opinion, one can also look at the hard facts when it comes to this comparison. For one, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series only has four books and five movies, compared to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of seven books and eight movies. When it comes to earnings in the domestic box office the Twilight series only has earned around $800 million compared to the over $2 billion the Harry Potter series has under its belt. With The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn –Part 2 scheduled for its release in November 2012, producers at Summit Entertainment should concentrate on that, instead of wasting their time “competing” against Harry Potter.
