It is with great sadness (happiness) that I report that as of this past weekend, our long national dream (nightmare) is over. That’s right, people–Breaking Dawn Part 2 premiered in theaters, thus ending The Twilight Saga once and for all, or at least until they reboot it in five years with hotter, younger actors. Just kidding, no one is younger than Taylor Lautner.
When we left our young Bella (Kristen Stewart) in Part 1, she had just turned into a vampire after her husband Edward, the sparkly heroin addict (Robert Pattinson), injected her with his own venom to keep her semi-alive because her horrifying monster baby had bludgeoned her to death during labor. Now the Cullens are training her in vampirism so she doesn’t give in to her bloodsucking instincts and murder the whole town of Forks. In the meantime, her absolutely terrifying CGI infant is growing faster than Taylor Lautner’s pectoral muscles, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything else about this movie because that baby is still haunting all of my waking and sleeping hours. One of their vampire cousins, Shannon from LOST, sees Renesmee leaping in a field and incorrectly assumes she’s an “immortal child,” a kind of fully vampiric and totally illegal vampire kid that wreaked all kinds of havoc in medieval-ish times. This makes the Volturi (the Italian vampire police) decide they have to kill this freak of nature as well as the entire Cullen coven, because just go with it, okay?
As we all know, Renesmee is only half-vampire, so the Cullens call up all of their vampire pals in other cities and ask them to come hang out in Washington for a few days so they can tell the Volturi that Nessie (Jacob’s terrible nickname for the tot) is just a normal kid who grows fast and looks computer-generated up to the age of six. All of the foreign vampires are the best part of BDP2, besides the twist ending, which it would be criminal of me to spoil for you here. I challenge you to find anything more hilariously awful on movie screens this season than the Russian envoys’ over-the-top accents, and I still haven’t stopped laughing about the scene where Jacob slowly disrobes in an attempt to explain the supernatural to Bella’s father. Taylor Lautner, if you didn’t know before that you have a promising career in porn ahead of you, surely you do now.
But as much fun as I had watching this piece of trash, I have to admit that this was one of the top five worst movies I’ve ever seen, and I say this as a person who has read all of the books and once spent approximately 10 hours assembling an Edward Cullen jigsaw puzzle. I’ve also got a few lingering questions about Stephenie Meyer’s poorly assembled vampire mythology. For example, why are almost all of the vampires in monogamous relationships? Are they all Mormons, too? I’m sure a few of them are into coupling up and settling down, but seriously, if they’re that good-looking and they never have to sleep, you’d think more than a few of them would be world-class sex fiends. Also, why are they all so badly dressed? They have endless money and cunning at their disposal–can’t they go on a shopping or robbery spree at Barneys or something? I suppose we’ll never know the answers to these questions, and that’s probably for the best. Enjoy sailing off to that big Blockbuster in the sky, Twilight. We’ll always remember you as the franchise that introduced us to these.
Photo via Flixster
