Twilight Breaking Dawn: Part II

A pattison is a kind of squash vegetable. Robert Pattinson is an actor. Unfortunately, the addition of an ‘n’ doesn’t do much to differentiate the two.

Applause and whooping greeted the buzz of the audio coming on. I was expecting this: the midnight screening full of real Twihard types, scaled down versions of nuttymadam3575. I sat beside some uneasy parents and their daughter, all three giggling nervously through the overtly nonsexual sex scenes. Yawning widely at the end, the mother stood up and said that it was ‘not nearly as bad as I had been expecting’.

I feel much the same. I was expecting the worst. The book, even in relation to its predecessors, is plainly quite bad. From a vomit-inducing run up to the birth, I felt like my stomach was attempting to escape out of my mouth as ‘Renesmee’ painfully escaped Bella’s vagina.

And yet the director, Condon, actually did a pretty good job of making such material palatable in the film. The cast employed just the right amount of humour and, in doing so, the film overall appeared conscious of what it was working with; it knew its limits.

So aside from Pattinson (and Stewart for that matter) having a somewhat vegetable-face style of representing the undead, there were a handful of interesting performances. Michael Sheen (Aro) steals it with his bizarre child-like cackle and there are a flurry of other weird but compelling vamps that come from all corners of the earth, just to make this final installment seem all the more cosy and complete.

But here arises a pet hate of mine – lines of people facing each other in forest clearings and not fighting. Fortunately, this was remedied by a rather epic speculative fight scene. It was at this point that I got the tingles (though it may have just been the air-con) and at last found some delight in the tired antagonism of the Volturi coming to gatecrash the party. Again.

Still, I don’t quite know how to sum up my feelings towards this film. Here’s the chronological run down:

“God, I love those trees in the opening credits.”

“CGI-enhanced baby faces are terrifying.”

“I love a good cottage between some trees.”

“The sex is rubbish.”

“I love those long roads that wind through the trees.”

“Fake Russian accents are hilarious.”

“I love that panning over the trees.”

“The ending song is dreadful.”

“I love the pretty sequence of actors stood near trees.”

As you can see, the positives of the trees outweigh the negatives of almost everything else.

The film came to a close and the glorified credits began. Yet the first comment from one of my usually twi-fanatic peers was ‘OMG, that guy’s real name is Booboo!’ (a.k.a. Seth Clearwater, FYI). No tears, no sighs of sadness that it’s all over, only disinterested observations on comedic forenames. And this from the same women that I sat with at midnight last year, swooning into our popcorn. In the end, we were more wowed by Stewart’s amazing falsies than by the worn out promises of ‘forever’.