Twilight 4: Breaking Down

Being a blog author sometimes isn't all that its cracked up to be.  I mean, yeah, there's the fame, fortune, and the adoration of fans all around the world, that's great.  But sometimes no number of panties sent in the mail by horny attractive female admirers can ever make-up for the less pleasant part of the job.  And by less pleasant parts, I'm talking about Twilight here.  I've been waiting a few weeks to see this movie, mostly because I was hoping to find an empty so that nobody could spot me actually paying money to see a Stephenie Meyers production.  I don't mind the movies so much, but if I ran into somebody I knew there, it would probably slaughter myself in shame.  Unfortunately the one I picked was packed weeks later.  Why aren't these people seeing "The Muppets"?  So I just had to sit my head high and laugh at loud at the movie these people actually cared about.  Then again, by writing so many posts on this subject on this blog, my future biographers will know my closeted fascination in this franchise.  In fact, my interest in Twilight will outlive me, because this blog will be floating around forgotten on the Interwebs years after I'm gone.

So when you remember Blue Highwind, remember this, he was a Team Jacob Twihard.  He willingly brought all of this upon himself.

Last time on Twilight, "Eclipse" turned out to be the most structurally well-made movie of the entire "Saga"*, which is why it was horribly boring and intolerable in every way.  The first two Twilight movies are masterpieces of awkwardness, probably the clumsiest and ham-handed romance movies you'll ever see that are not directed by George Lucas.  You could not ask for more hilarious disasters of movies, and for that they will always have a place in my heart right next to other grand failures like "Howard the Duck" or "Batman and Robin".  "Twilight 3" was merely mediocre, not hilariously bad, so I was somewhat disappointed.  But "Twilight 4" is properly entertaining, easily the best of the four in terms of pure movie making, yet still intensely stupid.  So its everything I could have asked for:  bad premise, bad story, bad implications, and quite a lot of blood at the end.  This is far away from the worst movie of 2011, remember a Transformer movie came out this year along with that ungodly piece of shit, "Green Lantern".  And its well shot!

Still, this was a movie that should have properly been rated R.  They should have gone all-out, pure gory insanity.  The end of this movie is like the ending to a Peter Jackson comedy: with blood all over the floor.  Why can't they relish that fact?  Why do we need to keep playing this show for the romance crowd?  The romance is over, the horror has finally begun.

"Twilight 4" begins with Jacob taking his shirt off, reminding us again why these movies are made.

The beginning of the story is a wedding, the ultimate goal of all romance stories.  The first thirty minutes of this movie is total matrimonial porn, dragging out the long wedding sequence so all the little girls can fantasize about the day they too marry an undead spawn of Satan.  Its a nice wedding, and I guess this should be the ending of the perfect love story.  Is this finally Happy Ever After for Bella and Edward?  Not quite.

You see, its Honeymoon time, in a magical private island off Rio.  Bella needs the vampire cock.  Now, this seems simple enough, but its actually a hugely intricate plot point that will basically dominate this movie.  Bella explains that she's not a vampirian yet because she wants to enjoy her honeymoon and not suffer that awkward blood-crazed puberty that begins every vampire's life.  Why not just delay the honeymoon?  The honeymoon begins when you say it begins, this is stupid.  Sex is always complicated, but what Stephenie Meyers is imagining is something like sex between two semi-compatible species, so things get weird.  Imagine having sex with an alien, then having its kid, its that strange.  So you have the complications around actually fucking, then the far more grotesque problems when a cute little vampire baby starts to grow inside Bella's tummy.  Shockingly, this means that "Twilight 4" has something every other Twilight movie lacked: a plot.  There is a problem to overcome here, that the creature tearing Bella apart from the inside.  You can't just cut it out, she loves it.

But that's getting a bit far ahead, let's shuffle back to the Honeymoon.

"Breaking Down" is a monumental movie in that I finally get a sense that the actors actually give a shit.  Bella and Edward are actually able to physically stand each other's presence now.  And in a remarkable achievement in Hollywood special effects, they got Kristen Stewart to smile.  The CG work on her is incredible, she actually looks like a woman in love, rather than a sarcastic teenager above it all.  In fact, she actually looks attractive in this movie, meaning that "Twilight 4" should automatically win the Oscar for Best Special Effects.  Incomprehensibly, I could almost sympathize with the Bella character in a few moments, like her desperate jitters before finally having sex with Edward.  My liking of this character is greatly increased because the new director wisely removed all of her awful awful awful internal monologues that plagued the last few movies.  Instead of immediately jumping into bed, she does everything she can to delay it:  shave her legs, brush her teeth, comb her hair, pick out lingerie, whatever.  If I ever had to fuck Robert Pattinson, I too would try to delay that as much as possible.

The sex scene is hilarious, by the way.  Perhaps the funniest moment of the whole series.  You can't see anything, this is a PG-13 movie (and I mean nothing), but you are in the room when Edward climaxes.  So since he has super strength he has to be super-careful to not hurt Bella, but he does lose control at one point. As he's cumming, he grabs a section of the wall and shatters it.  The whole room falls apart from the raw stupid force of his sexuality.  Well, I started giggling about that scene for the next forty-five minutes.

The next morning, Edward decides that though he enjoyed sex with Bella, he can't do it again.  (GAY)  Because he hurt her too much, because of his super vampire strength.  (GAY)  Bella has only like three brushes, the sex doesn't seem that rough to me, but Edward apparently thinks that's too much.  (GAY)  Bella, the one who actually was hurt here, wants to do it again because the sex was "the best a human could have" - how should would know this is beyond me.  Edward will have none of it.  (GAY)  They could just fuck in ways other than the missionary position, there are all kinds of options available here.  Just have Bella on top!  In fact, that's better for Edward, less work.  (GAY)  This now begins a montage of Edward and Bella doing all sorts of things on their Honeymoon other than having sex.  (GAY)  They play chess, they jump off waterfalls, they do everything but watch TV, all because Edward is uninterested in his bride.  (GAY)  Kristin Stewart is looking pretty fine in this movie by the way, I might have mentioned that before.  She actually has flesh-colored skin, not pure white nothing.  But you know, Edward isn't going for it.  (GAY)

What I'm saying here is that the movie does not do a very good job of showing why Edward might not want to have sex.  The point is muddled and incomprehensible, so some immature people might misunderstand the film's meaning here and say that Edward might not be entirely heterosexual.  Also, HE'S FUCKING HOMOSEXUAL, BELLA.  YOU'RE BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE.

Robert Pattinson's performance in this movie, by the way, is as terrible as ever.  His character is utterly flat and incidental, he's basically just a prop for this teen fantasy.  You know the dude in porn movies?  That thing you try to look past in order to see the chick but always finds a way to get his naked ass in front of the camera?  That's Robert Pattinson in this movie.  Kristin Stewart might be actually trying, but Pattinson is still giving the same low-energy disinterested acting job that he's been doing for four movies now.  At the very least they ditched the clown make-up in this movie, and the vampires no longer sparkle.  He's still awful.  In fact, he's now dragging the movie down, get rid of this guy.  And this isn't just a Team Jacob bias that's coming out here, Jacob too is dragging this story as well.  But we'll get to that soon enough.

The fun begins when Bella suddenly starts feeling a bit ill.  Oh wait, she's actually seriously ill, there's a baby kicking inside her.  So they fly her back to Washington to Edward's dad to see if something can be done.  As it turns out, this sort of thing has never happened ever in the history of vampirism.  These beings have been walking the planet for centuries, and they've never seen shit like this.  Now what the heck is inside Bella?  A zombie baby?  A bat?  An alien lizard baby?  A puppy?  Well, we'll find out soon enough, won't we?  I love when movies are about things, don't you?  This is what Twilight has been lacking so far:  stuff happening.  Finally the stupid Edward-Jacob love triangle has ended for something we all can enjoy, pure unleaded nightmare fuel.

Well, the Edward-Jacob love knot isn't actually entirely finished.  Plot-wise, its been settled beyond settled, but this fucking movie still likes to tease what remaining Team Jacob fans are out there.  Jacob doesn't attend the wedding directly, he's too pissed off.  Later in the reception though, Edward tells Bella that she has a "present" that has just arrived, and that gift is... Jacob.  Edward gives his new wife some time alone with his romantic rival, clearly not imagining the possibility that they'll just screw in the woods behind his back, whatever.  Then Bella and Jacob start to flirt and they dance, and the movie is just fucking with us now.  This scene is impossible according to the story they've constructed, yet Bella still somehow loves Jacob, pretty damn obviously.   Naturally Jacob winds up screaming and ranting and raving because Bella won't take him, as you'd expect.  What did everybody think was going to happen?  Jacob always acts like this!  He's been whining like a bitch about this girl in three movies now!  So for the rest of the movie he sulks in the corner and makes really unfunny sarcastic remarks.  Jacob, do you actually have any testicles to match those sculpted abs?  He's awful in this movie too, by the way.  Bella has wound up the best character of the three leads, I am stunned to silence.

...

Moving on.

Now the big debate around this movie is whether Bella should abort the fetus -I mean baby, the movie is very particular about using "baby", not "fetus".  Every character that calls the ever expanding vampiric tumor inside Bella a "fetus" gets corrected immediately as some kind of half-assed Pro-Life argument** from the author.  Well, the situation Bella is currently in happens to be the single most compelling reason for an abortion you would ever encounter.  This lil' nosferatu is killing her, it is insane to believe that anything else will happen.  But Bella is so sure that her baby is normal, based entirely on some kind of esoteric feeling she's having.  By the time you see her six weeks pregnant she looks like she's just come from a spa stay at Auschwitz.  For five cents a day, you could feed little Bella and give her a home - its that bad.  She's got a full baby bump, which seems lovely, but its covered in bruises.  Bella's appearance is the scariest part of this whole movie.

Bella decides to keep the baby because... well, she has a pleasant feeling.  That's it.  All other logic tells her that whatever is inside her is some kind of monster even age-old vampires do not understand, but Bella feels so good about it.  Did I say that I liked the Bella character before?  I take it back now, she's an idiot.  No medical stuff can actually see inside her womb, the creature has put up some kind of mystical black fog.  Ashley Greene, who you might remember as the hottest chick in these movies, has other powers other than being really good-looking.  She can see the future.  But the baby has somehow put up a very Plot Convenient mist around Bella's future, so Ashley's powers are worthless.  Why even invent a character who can see the future if in every movie you have to work out a way for her powers to not work?  Stephenie Meyers, you screwed-up.  Another bad sign for Bella is that her fetus is only settled when she drinks human blood.  No, they don't kill anybody for it, they just use medical blood and feed it to Bella in a styrofoam cup and straw, in case you didn't this movie was stupid enough already.   Luckily for Bella, "Twilight 4" is a stupid movie, so the baby she gives birth to is normal... I think.  But Bella still dies making it.

While this is happening there is a long and confusing sideplot involving the werewolves.  Apparently there's a treaty between the vampires and the wolves that Bella cannot die or be turned into a vampire - and when she's dieing of a vampire pregnancy its hard for either outcome to be avoided.  Now why the werewolves care so much about Bella specifically is a mystery to me, and the terms of this treaty are very confusing.  Jacob goes against the wolves and supports the Cullens, and he is joined by two minor werewolf characters who do nothing this whole movie.  We'll ignore them then.  I thought the wolves only cared about Bella because Jacob liked Bella, so when Jacob leaves that would mean they could all go home and ignore this whole silly situation.  They don't.  The wolves surround Cullen Manor, and now there's this fairly forgettable action side story.  Eventually it leads to a terrible fight scene between two sides which I cannot say I particularly care about.

"Twilight 4" blew its effects budget on making Bella look human, so the werewolves still look terrible.  Hey, that reminds me of one of the best scenes in the movie.  All the werewolves join up together for a big huddle and discuss what to do.  But they're in wolf form, so they can't talk.  So what they do is dub the actors over while showing the wolf forms.  Its hysterically bad.  If Godzilla couldn't make talking monsters look good, why did Twilight even think it could do better?  At least there aren't Kanji word bubbles.

Okay, here comes the moment you've all been waiting for:  the birthing scene.  Bella starts to drink her daily blood, but then she drops the cup.  Suddenly her back FLIES back, and her spine snaps, then her knees bend backwards, and she's down on the floor.  Next thing you know its a big silly birth scene, everybody is freaking out.  You see this all from Bella's POV, meaning that all the best potential bloody scenes are covered up.  In fact, I think the less we see actually makes it better, because you have no idea what's happening to her body while watching.  Is her stomach being ripped open?  How much horror is happening to her?  Its an effective sequence, all ruined when she gives birth not to this but a perfectly normal baby girl (who may or may not be a vampire, I'm not sure).  Lame.  At least Bella keels over now.

Edward freaks out upon seeing Bella dead, and so tries the last desperate thing to save her:  inject her with vampire venom.  Vampires have venom?  Does biting a dead person make them vampires?  Why wouldn't it?  Vampires are dead anyway, I don't see why this should be such a big problem.  Well, injecting her with vampire fluids doesn't work, so Edward proceeds to take bites out of her.  Then I guess he just assumes this will all work out by the end of the movie, and leaves the room.

The baby is named "Renesmee", a name Bella made up completely.  She combined her mom's name, Renee, with the place the baby was conceived(?), "Esme" to make this silly name.  Why do you care where the baby was conceived?  I guess its better than the male name "E.J" - "Edward Jacob".  Yeah, Edward is such a limp cock that he would let his wife name his son after his biggest romantic rival.  By the way, Bella's naming scheme is interesting to say the least.  My grandma's name is "Barbara" and I know I was conceived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (don't ask why I know that).  So my name according to this plan would be "Barwaukee".  There is a word for ideas like this:  bad.  The saddest part is that I know all kinds of Twilight fans are going to name their girls "Renesmee" now too.  The world is often a sad place.

Here comes the best part of the movie:  Jacob falls in love with the baby.  In the next scene, the baby transforms into a very crude CG cherub.  Then Jacob "imprints" on it, which is this weird bio-sexual process the werewolves have.  It means that you immediately fall in love with whatever creature you've imprinted upon, lose all sense of control over your destiny, and have no choice but to love them forever.  So poor Jacob here now has sexual feelings for girl only minutes old.  The movie tries to make the best out of this awful plot point by giving us a montage of adult Renessessmeemee, but the movie is unsalvagable at this point.  "Breaking Dawn" just broke every measure of stupid, we're in an all new realm of bad now.  Where do you even start?  Just, Jacob falls in love with a baby, that's all you need to hear.

How does Jacob go about wooing this baby now, I wonder?  "Hey Bella, forgive me for saying this, but YOUR BABY'S HOT!"  "Bella, um... you got to introduce me to your baby."  "Bella, do you like, need a sitter?  I'm hot, she's hot, this is happening here."  What will their first date be?  "Alvin and the Chipmunks:  Chipwrecked"?  I know this is all fake and all, but I feel like I need to call some kind of fictional child protection authority.  Whatever Stephenie Meyers is doing here isn't against the law per se, but she should go to jail anyway just because.

The fact Jacob falls in love with the baby happens to be extremely convenient for the story by the way.  And I don't just mean this finally solves the love triangle plot line the most awful way imaginable, it also solves the werewolf war.  Because according to the Werewolf Constitution, Article XI, if your imprint on a person, they become part of the tribe.  So Renezzezzezzemee is now an honorary werewolf, I guess, meaning the other dogs can't touch her.  I don't see why the werewolves still can't kill all the Cullens and just spare the baby, but then again, I have so many questions about this movie I don't know where to start.

And now everything has worked out, ultimately.  Except Bella is still dead.  "Not for long" says the plot, and she starts turning vampirish.  She reinflates, her busted rib-cage comes back together, her hair turns a nicer shade of brown.  Being an undead creature of the night is great, huh?  Then we see Bella's eyes, and I know they're going to open up to show she's still alive.  But they don't at first.  We cut to Edward, eyes, still no opening.  END MOVIE, END ALREADY!  Then finally her eyes open.  Brilliant.  She's a vampire now.  Wait for part 2.

Then during the end credits we get one final scene.  Michael Sheen has gotten a letter telling him that Bella is vampirese now.  This one scene is the best part of the whole movie, because Michael Sheen does not give a shit so bad.  He's reinventing cheesy overacting here, its magical filmmaking.  If he's going to be in part two a significant amount that will be a great movie.

But of course, I can't end the review without talking about the best character in this movie, and indeed all Twilight movies:  Bella's dad.  Bella's dad is great.  Who doesn't love this man by now?  For years he's sat around and suffered while his daughter chills around with the forces of darkness.  This time he's giving an exasperated performance, completely surrendered to Bella's craziness now.  He doesn't get the whole Cullen thing, he doesn't even know why he's in these movies, but he sure can't do anything about it.  So he rolls his eyes in a few scenes and generally steals the show.  You can tell once he gets home he's going to have the hugest most balliest party ever.  Bella's dad be getting all the bitches once Bella be gone.  He has it coming, built up a lot of karma while dealing with Bella's lunacy.  Look at his eyes, he needs to get drunk and get laid badly.  (And don't we all, in a way?)   I want a Bella's dad movie.  Now.  After soon to be five of these Twilight things, the world deserves some real entertainment.

Unfortunately, they will never make a Bella's dad movie, instead they'll just keep pumping out the Twilight series.  Luckily we only got one more trial to overcome until we're finally free.  "Twilight 5" is coming next year, and I'm sure it will be properly awful.  Watching these movies can be a depressing affair, "Twilight 4" was clearly made by a talented director who was trying his best to make a good movie despite the overwhelming odds.  His work shines through, but the movie is still awful.  Its a battle against impossible odds:  failure is the only option.

At least the vampires stopped sparkling.

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* TWILIGHT IS NOT A FUCKING SAGA!!!  AARRRRRRRRRRRR!!!  I WILL SLAUGHTER THE FACE'S OF ANYBODY WHO DISAGREES ON THIS POINT!

** The movie actually works its hardest to skirt completely around the abortion issue.  Bella refuses to have an abortion because she's completely delusional, but she never says she's not doing it for any grand moral reasons.  She makes a point to say its my choice, not that its right.  I can't be sure how much of this is from Stephenie Meyers or the director, but the right-wing bullcrap in this movie could be a lot worse.  By the way, I'm all for abortions if it involves vampire babies killing people.  We can all agree on that, right?