Twilight, Breaking Dawn is a putrid festering piece of shit. You know those gas station bathrooms that are cleaned once a month, and this one hasn’t been in two months, and at least five or six people have had explosive diarrhea in and around and on the toilet? Yeah. Picture yourself locked inside that bathroom stall for 117 minutes with horrible music playing, and you have just recreated the cinematic experience that is Breaking Dawn.

Be warned, because the following review is both long and will contain spoilers.

I went to see this abomination earlier today and have been struggling to put my thoughts together in a coherent form, which is more difficult than it sounds when you are filled with unspeakable rage. When I arrived at the theatre, a few minutes early, it was completely empty. Sure, I live in a college town and it’s Thanksgiving break, but I expected at least a few Twihards. However, as the minutes ticked away, the only people who joined me were a gay couple in their 30s.

I was worried – mostly because I wanted to gauge the reactions of the crowd around me to see what they thought of it, and I didn’t think the gay couple was representative of Twilight’s fan base. Fortunately, a few more showed up just as the previews started playing – several couples, aged 40 and up, a few overweight young women in their twenties, and lastly, two teenage girls escorting their unhappy teenage boyfriends, leaving us without a crowd of about 20.

The movie begins as all the Twilight movies begin – listening to Kristen Stewart narrate her lines in the most flat, expressionless, coked-out voice you can possibly imagine. Look, movie, I realize you’re stuck with Stewart’s acting because she’s tied to the franchise, but seriously, if she is that bad at recording voiceovers, eliminate the fucking voiceovers. They’re never important or meaningful anyway, and honestly, I’ve heard robotic computer voices that have more inflection than Stewart.

The wedding invitation arrives at Jacob’s house. He is furious, runs outside, and tears his shirt off. This takes place in the first 30 seconds of the movie. Subtle. [Although surprisingly, Jacob keeps his shirt on for most of this movie…unlike, say, Eclipse, where every scene had Jacob either shirtless, or had him removing his shirt]. After a few more people get invitations….you know, I’m not going to recap this entire movie step by step. Let’s ramble through this:

Problem One: The Padding

Breaking Dawn Part One is an hour and fifty-seven minutes long. Approximately an hour and twenty-seven minutes of that is padding. That’s right: there’s about 30 minutes of actual plot, and that’s being pretty generous.

I don’t envy the scriptwriter or the director, because Breaking Dawn the book has about enough material to be cut into a 90-minute film, and they had to turn it into two two-hour films. And how did they do this? They showed us everything. We see Bella learning to walk in her high heels. We get a scene of pre-wedding angst. We see the wedding preparations. Bella has a dream about the wedding that ends with her killing everyone. It goes on and on and one. No exaggeration…the wedding lasts for the first 30 minutes of the movie – I know because I was timing it. THIRTY MINUTES of a wedding. Including several shots of Stephenie Meyer in the audience. If you’re watching the movie, it’s not too hard to spot – it’s because she’s the only person in the entire fucking audience to get a close-up.

From there, there’s another 20 minutes or so of Edward and Bella’s honeymoon, until they learn that she’s pregnant and the “plot”, if you could call it a plot, actually gets going. But in the first 50 minutes of the movie, there is about 10 minutes of actually relevant material.

After this point, the movie actually picks up a bit, by which I mean it helped me shift from being in a coma to just being extremely bored.

Problem Two: The Lack of Padding

Now comes the irony: the movie doesn’t explain shit.

If I was writing this script, and someone told me I had to turn half of the book into a two-hour movie, I’d quit. But assuming I really needed the money, I’d do my damnedest to try and fill the movie with information and scenes that are actually interesting and relevant to the plot.

Example: I’ve heard a number of reviews absolutely astonished at the fact that Bella is surprised that…you know, having unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy. Now, as I recall from the book, this is addressed early on where characters say that vampire/human children are impossible, which makes sense. Edward and Bella bang because they don’t think it’s physically possible to conceive a child. This is completely left out of the movie. Why? No fucking idea. It would be simple enough to toss in a line before the wedding that gets that entire plot point out of the way, but instead, we need to see Bella and Charlie walk down the aisle in real time.

Example 2: After they conceive the demon-child, essentially everyone wants Bella to get an abortion…except for Rosalie, who had previously despised Bella. And this is actually something that worked extremely well in the book. You see, Bella wants to become a vampire, and Rosalie can’t understand this because she wants nothing more than to be a mother, and that’s something she can never be because vampires can’t bear children. She sees Bella as throwing away her life, and Bella disagrees. But, when Bella gets pregnant, Rosalie views the pregnancy as a miracle and wants to keep the child, in opposition to everyone else, because she finally gets to be an aunt/surrogate mother to the baby.

That’s great. That is absolutely terrific drama, and as a screenwriter looking to fill up space in this movie, that is a subplot that would work perfectly. And so, of course, it’s not even touched upon. In the movie, Rosalie is the only one, aside from Bella, who doesn’t want to abort the baby. No explanation is ever given for this. At all. Not even a throwaway line.

The Good:

There’s a werewolf named Seth who is actually a decent character.

Bella’s makeup as her body deteriorates is excellent. She turns into an emaciated skeleton, and it is extremely well-done. Kudos to whoever was in charge of that.

Charlie (Bella’s father) once again, is awesome. He has the only decent lines in the movie, including a hilarious speech at the wedding where he explains that he knows Edward will be a good husband, because he’s a cop, he has guns, and he knows how to hunt people down. Unfortunately, this is in the middle of some of the most awkward speeches ever.

The Bad:

So yeah. Those wedding speeches. They feature Emmett cracking sex/vampire jokes, Jessica acting like a total bitch, Bella’s mom trying to sing an atrocious lullaby (at a wedding??? What the fuck???), and Alice being unbelievably awkward. You’d think she would be able to see her future and tell how bad that speech would be and just opt to not give one.

The sex scenes…were just terrible. Most of them feature Edward’s back. In addition, in the book, they not only break the bed, but Edward shreds a couple pillows. I predicted that both of these scenes would be cut because as ridiculous as they sounded in the book, they would be even worse on screen. Nope. They were both in there, and they looked stupid.

Speaking of the sex scenes…so, after they fuck the first night Bella has some bruises. Not bad bruises…pretty small ones actually, certainly no more than someone might get from normal rough sex, or maybe someone who bruises easily. Edward, of course, flips his shit and then refuses to have sex with her again, despite Bella doing her best to seduce him with sexy lingerie. They then spent the rest of their honeymoon hiking, swimming, and – wait for it – playing chess. Yes. Chess.

Let’s talk about this problem. Edward, of course, is very strong, and he’s afraid of hurting Bella. So, what could they do? Just off the top of my head…why not try it with Bella on top? Stephenie Meyer didn’t write the script, you can use other positions besides missionary.

But let’s set that aside, and talk about Edward not wanting to hurt Bella. Because he doesn’t know his own strength. This is a fairly common trope, which is a pity, because generally, it’s complete bullshit.

Here’s why: People are actually pretty strong. A strong adult can inflict serious damage with nothing more than his or her fists. And yet, surprisingly, a human can still do extremely light, delicate tasks like, say, eye surgery, or making watches.

Or, to use Discovery channel example, a hyena can bite with 1,000 pounds of pressure…and it can also carry its cubs around with its teeth, using the skin on the back of the pups’ neck.

This doesn’t add up. It would not be that hard for Edward to restrain himself to keep from hurting Bella. And, if he’s worried…seriously, put Bella on top and let her dictate how fast and hard the sexing is. Problem solved.

And oh yeah…the baby’s name. Bella has two ideas: if it’s a boy, she’ll name it E.J. – Edward Jacob. Because why not use the name of your husband and your ex-almost-boyfriend who is still madly in love with you and wants to kill your husband? And, if it’s a girl, she wants to combine the name of her mother, Renee, and Edward’s mom, Esme…into Renesmee. This was really fucking stupid in the books, and it’s even dumber in the movies. To Jacob’s credit, when Bella asks him what he thinks, he does a pretty good job of showing just how stupid he thinks that name is. Bella even asks the other characters, “Is that weird?” a couple times, and which point I yelled at the movie screen “It’s fucking weird, Bella!” The entire theatre burst into laughter, and I heard a half-dozen people agreeing with me.

The Ugly:

Let’s start with the werewolf CGI. There have been many, many complaints about the CGI for the werewolves in the previous movies, which was atrocious. And that continues for this movie. The werewolves are terrible. I have no idea why. The Twilight movies make enough money to afford decent visual effects, so why does it feel like I’m watching Saturday morning cartoons?

On the other hand, I assume the producers know that even if the special effects are bad enough to make people want to kill themselves, people are still going to flock to their movies, because the primary audience doesn’t give a flying fuck about the effects, they’re just there to ogle the hot sculpted bodies of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner.

This culminates during a scene where all the wolves run together and meet in a lumberyard to argue about what to do, and it’s laughably bad. Picture the scene: a bunch of obscenely bad CGI wolves milling about, while we have their voices dubbed in of everyone mentally arguing. Making it worse, the voices are as deep and as dramatically over-the top as they can possible be. It’s like watching Optimus Prime, Andre the Giant, and the Old Spice guy have an argument, if they were all furries and on acid.

Speaking of werewolves, at the end of the movie there’s a poorly choreographed fight scene between the vampires and werewolves that goes on for several minutes. You have incredibly powerful vampires and werewolves all going to town on each other for quite a while, at finally Jacob runs out and reveals he’s imprinted on baby Renesmee and everyone stops fighting and peace is made. And not a single person was hurt. We see people beating the shit out of each other, and it has been clearly established in previous movies that it takes about a third of a second for one of these creatures to kill another, and nobody has so much as a bruise.

Oh yeah, the imprinting. There were a couple scenes that I thought the movie would leave out, because no matter how creepy and fucked up something is on the page, it’s 100 times worse when you actually have to see it. The first was the birth scene (we’ll get to that) and the second is the imprinting scene.

For the uninitiated: in Twilightverse, werewolves can imprint on people, and at that point they’re basically destined for each other, free will be damned. They are going to be together and be unconditionally in love with each other.

At some point in the series, a dude imprints on a little girl. And the series goes to great lengths to explain why that isn’t creepy and fucked up and filled with child molester vibes. They explain that when she’s little, he’ll just be a loving older brother or an uncle, a protector, a guardian, and there is nothing sleazy or pervy about it. And then once she’s legal and stuff they’ll fall in love and get their freak on but THERE IS NOTHING WEIRD OR GROSS ABOUT THAT AT ALL.

Right. So baby Renesmee is born and Jacob goes in to kill her because Bella is dead at this point and he imprints on Renesmee and he flashes through their entire lives together. Which means, of course, sex. He’s thinking about having sex someday. While looking at a newborn. A fucking two-hour old baby. Jacob is thinking about how in approximately 18 years, he and the baby are going to have red hot vampire/werewolf sex.

And they left it in.

The second one is the birth scene. You see, baby Renesmee is thrashing around in the womb, breaking ribs and stuff. And then she breaks Bella’s spine. No, seriously. She breaks Bella’s spine from inside the womb. Naturally, they decide they need to deliver the baby via c-section. Rosalie whips out a scalpel and starts going all Wolverine on Bella’s tummy, but….apparently that doesn’t work. Why? It’s not explained. I think in the book it’s hinted at that the uterus wall is all vampirically hard, and so they have to cut the baby out using vampire teeth.

Edward’s teeth.

Yes. Edward chews a hole through Bella’s stomach to deliver her baby.

Show me the most horrible, disgusting, high-octane nightmare fuel horror movie you can find, and I can guarantee there will be nothing in there that is more fucked up than watching a vampire chew a baby out of a pregnant woman’s belly.

And they left it in.

It’s creatively shot, of course, so most of the disgusting bits are offscreen, and finally Edward pops up with some blood tricking down his jaw, holding the baby. I think it was Spoony who described the baby as being covered in chunky salsa, and I haven’t been able to think of a description that is better than that. I have seen babies being born, and I have never seen one covered in all that. Then again, none of them were the undead spawn of Satan, so what do I know?

Oh yeah, and there’s no umbilical cord or placenta. Figure that one out, why don’t you?

I should probably also note the soundtrack, which is 75% shitty piano music, and 25% shitty pop songs. It’s hard to put into words how horrible the music is in this movie. Which is odd, because in Twilight, at least, the music wasn’t nearly as bad. Sure, all the songs were filled with angst and most of them were pretty bad, but compared to Breaking Dawn, the music in Twilight was amazing.

I should probably spend a little time talking about abortion, since that’s what the second half of the movie is about. You see, everyone is convinced that the baby is going to kill Bella, so everyone but Bella and Rosalie want her to have an abortion. And nobody…absolutely nobody sits down and has a rational conversation about that. How does Edward Cullen respond? “We’re going to get it out of you, Bella?” And Bella, who just recently discovered she had a bun in the oven, is horrified, clutches her stomach, and says “It?” Later, Alice Cullen keeps referring to it as “the fetus” while Rosalie jumps it and demands they call it “the baby”.

Now, I’m not opposed to movies taking on the topic of abortion. I think that if it’s handled with care, it could be very well-done. I am opposed to movies taking on abortion and doing an absolutely horrible job at it. Breaking Dawn, bless its heart, makes everyone on both sides of the argument come across as insensitive assholes, who are unable to articulate why they feel the way they do or defend their opinion with any kind of logic.

In Summary

Breaking Dawn is an absolutely terrible movie. The script, the dialogue, the action, the plot, the characters, the music, the CGI…all of it is bad. Very, very bad. And while previous Twilight movies were pretty funny if you watched them with a friend and mocked them the entire way through, Breaking Dawn is just so goddamned boring. If you thought that, say, any of the first three movies were boring because nothing really happens, you’re really going to hate Breaking Dawn.

Breaking Dawn, Part II