Breaking Dawn Part One - Tine

Indulging in a rather embarrassing guilty pleasure, I went to the cinema to see the newest chapter in the Twilight saga, Breaking Dawn Part 1. To be fair, I have seen all the other Twilight films, and on some level appreciated their inconsistent style, bad acting and glittering vampires. But Breaking Dawn takes it all to a whole new level, which keeps escalating as the film progresses. Actually it took the whole cinema experience to a whole new level, which is why I decided to write a review on it. I went in expecting to see some more vampire/werewolf drama, but was met with Rosemary’s Baby meets … I don’t rightly know actually, I have never seen anything like it.

It starts out pretty mellow with a teenage wedding of the extravagant type, Edward the vampire finally gets his Bella, where a majority of the guests look like playboy bunnies with fangs. After a quick (and completely unnecessary) stop-over in Rio, literally bed-breaking sex and an unexpected pregnancy, the beginning of it only left my mouth slightly open in wonder and horror.  Then after a lengthy period of sexual frustration it gets really bad, with the human, Bella, pregnant with a monster child, turning increasingly into the living dead and drinking blood from styrofoam cups.

There is a much talked of and remarkable amount of thinking moments in this film; Days of Our Lives-style, but without the enlightening voiceover. This increases the sense of complete disjointedness, instead of a storyline the plot consist more of random scenes, some from rom-coms, some from action films, and a lot from horror films. More often than intended, the whole audience broke into a collective fit of laughter of the ‘what?’-kind. I’ve never been to the cinema with such a feeling of being at the circus, everyone screaming and laughing and almost retching collectively. And we’re talking a big crowd. It was like a festival, a continual journey of awe and wonder, through a never-ending love triangle between Edward, Bella and werewolf Jacob (and the rivalry between vampires and werewolves in general). When, at the end, Edward takes a nibble out of pretty much every limb on Bella’s body in an attempt to turn her vampire before she dies I think people were ready to throw rotten tomatoes at the screen. Excellent entertainment in other words.

Not to say that this film doesn’t touch on deeper cultural discussions, the obvious being the question of sex before marriage and abortion, although personally I think the choices made in the film were made for the sake of fattening up the already thin plot. And for those of you who are worried about lack of dramatic content in the next and last chapter of this saga, do not worry, we get a lovely preview of Jacob’s future feelings for Bella and Edward’s child through a stylish montage. Oh, and the child will be named after Bella’s mom Renee and Edward’s mom Esmé, making her name Renesmee (I’m not kidding).