The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 1 opened this past Thursday to screaming fans as all the other movies in the series have... but for some reason there seemed to be more people this time around as well as some 3am showings which I have never seen for a movie before. If this wasn't dangerous enough, I ended up having to park in the dirt outside of the theater I choose to go to 30mins before the movie opened (I admit to forgetting the movie was even premiering this week), yet I still was able to get a ticket. That was pretty shocking. Either way, on to the review!!
Image copyright
Summit Entertainment.
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Specs:Studio: Summit
Director: Bill Condon
Theater Premier Date: Nov 18, 2011
Runtime: 117mins
Genre(s): Vampires, Supernatural, Romance
Synopsis:
Basically Edward and Bella finally get married and have their honey moon with a few surprises in toll. Jacob lets Bella go with almost no fight, and Rosalie becomes buddy buddy with Bella after the honeymoon.
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I've always gone into each one of the
Twilight movies knowing not to expect perfection. These movies were never meant to be blockbuster hits, as well as were they never meant to be dead on adaptations of the original source material. Despite this, I have always enjoyed them as their own entities. A good example of this would be the
Harry Potter adaptations. They were never exact adaptations and this was fine with me because I like to enjoy movies based on books or comics or even real life events to be different enough to be enjoyed as their own piece of entertainment.
Yet in
Breaking Dawn's case for the first time I did hope for a closer adaptation. I wanted Bella at that gas station being embarrassed about having a tanker equivalent of a car. I wanted Jacob to continually try and convince Bella that she could have a regular human life rather than live for eternity with an unchanging vampire. Most of all I wanted Bella to have a strange craving for eggs, but that seemed no where to be found. Even though I was disappointed in how different the movie was from the book, I thought "hey it's only the first part. Maybe part two will have more from the book." so I was able to still enjoy the movie... yet I raged on knowing it was more different than the other adaptations had been to their respected volumes of the series.
Now now now understand this is a movie for people who either have been a fan of the movies from the beginning (and plainly don't care about the movies making any sense) or those who have read the books and can understand what's going on without all the details being slayed out for them. It's a movie for people who are fans already, not for people who are just watching this one. It'll make next to no sense and a lot of the jokes could be considered inside jokes and you need a lot of the back story to understand what's going on. There's this one scene in particular where the attendees of the wedding are giving small speeches; just about everything they say are inside jokes or references to the other movies so it's best to have seen
Twilight, New Moon and
Eclipse before watching this one.
Possibly the best part of this movie is a mixture of the music and the effects (not the wolfs though, that effect has gotten a bit old). The soundtrack not only has new tracks but some new versions of old ones, which is pretty neat because this is a good way to tie in the first few movies to this one despite the major change of. And the effects were breath ta-kingly good. I have no idea how they had the time to get these effects cranked out and I wish I could talk about them more but in a way I'd be spoiling the movie.
The acting was much better this time around. Kristin Stewart plays the part of Bella really well in this one, but hey that might have also been due to the amazing (insert spoiler) effects. RPatz is the same as always, not much has changed in his acting. Same with Taylor Lautner and just about everyone else. Ok, so the acting is pretty much the same. And the makeup wasn't much better. Most of the vampire character's hair were darker this time around and their eyes were almost never golden, except when there were close up shots.
Hmmm, there wasn't much story wise either. Just the wedding, honeymoon and a pretty significant event afterwards but other than that this movie feels more like a filler episode of some anime than a solid silverscreen flick. Even so, I did really enjoy this movie and I just don't know why.
The final verdict is that if you have read the books and pay less than full price for a ticket I say go see this one. Seeing a few of the scenes from the book on screen has helped me visualize more so than before. Maybe I'll do a full comparison review to the book one day. Maybe. No promises.
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Image copyright Summit Entertainment.
