Grizzly Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

I feel like the entire film industry is beginning to revolve around pop culture. Now, this isn’t anything new, I know, but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t frightening, with franchises that run for anywhere from five years (Twilight Saga) to 50 years (James Bond films). The surprising thing, though, is how much money these franchises make. Franchises like the Harry Potter films are in the multi-billions, as are franchises like Twilight and the James Bond movies.

For our fourth helping of vampire-human-wolf romance, Breaking Dawn opens on a distressed Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) – tearing off his shirt to reveal his abs as he does in every Twilight film – who has just received an invitation to the wedding of Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). We then cut to Bella and Edward who are preparing for the festivities, exchanging cringe-worthy, lovey-dovey, pseudo-humorous dialogue that makes you just want to press some kind of magical fast-forward button in the theater.

The wedding scene itself is overdone, as is the rest of the movie. The scene prior is an oddly humorous and equally disturbing nightmare scene that doesn’t juxtapose well with the humorous and joyous status that the wedding scene attempts to achieve. Then comes the 90 minute long honeymoon scene that seems to never end.

If Breaking Dawn achieves one thing, it can be rightfully named the most boring and badly written Twilight movie of all of them, which is really saying something. Jacob is as whiny as ever, Bella is more insecure than ever, and Edward emotes about as much as a Saudi Arabian housewife.

And don’t even get me started on the birth scene. It’s f***ing disgusting. That’s all I have to say about that. Then, when the little half-vamp bastard pops out, she’s disgusting. But what’s even more disgusting is what happens next. Trust me, I couldn’t make this up.

Jacob Black, who’s eternally in love with Bella, sees the baby, and becomes transfixed. The film fades to a flashforward of the child at a much older age. Jacob then imprints her, which in Twi-cabulary, basically means that he’s in love with her until she dies. Thinking of this from a standpoint that doesn’t involve pedophilia, it’s not even that romantic, but with the whole pedophilia aspect added in, it veers off the course from romantic to f***ing disgusting. The movie put such a bad taste in my mouth after that I didn’t even care what happened next, which is convenient, because nothing interesting pops up like it should. If you’re going to split one adaptation into two films, at least make the movies interesting.

The Twilight series is known for having good soundtracks with songs by bands we actually like. Admittedly, the soundtracks are all great, but Breaking Dawn doesn’t even seem to try in this department. Trading in well-crafted rock songs by good bands, for either whiny pop songs or melodramatic, epic, and usually unnecessary pieces of music, in an attempt to maybe keep everyone from drifting off about 45 minutes in to the movie.

Almost everything about The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is overly serious, pretentious, boring, and so full of itself. Even fans of the Twilight series might start falling asleep in the second half. On the bright side, the end credits are designed really well, and they were by far the most exciting part of the movie. Also, I heard that people were having seizures during the birth scene due to the quick flashes of light. I theorize that this is because after 89 minutes of such boring-ass nothingness, the sudden and infrequent (there are honestly about 4 flashes of light in the entire scene. I expected to see like an electrical storm happening in the theater. The credits had more flash than this scene.) flashes of light woke up some viewers to the point of involuntary convulsion. If I had the choice between bad movie and seizure, I’d choose seizure any day.

1/5 Bears

Images: Summit Entertainment


6 thoughts on “Grizzly Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1”

  1. I’m a twilight fan. Not overly done. But I like it. I feel that your opinion is overly exaggerated and petty. If you ever picked up any of the books you would understand it way better. Yes, the movie wasn’t great. But, it was almost exactly how the book portrayed it. Unlike Harry Potter 6-7 pt. 2 that were horribly portrayed as nothing like the book. That was disgusting.


    1. WELL…you shouldn’t judge a movie on the book it’s based on. They are 2 separate things. It’s one thing to not like a movie because you loved the book and they changed stuff, but you can’t justify a bad movie because you liked the book. It’d be like me trying to defend THE SPIRIT cause the I liked the source material. The truth is, from a film perspective this was easily the weakest of the 4 movies.

      And if a movie needs for you to have read the book to fully understand it, than the filmmakers didn’t do their job very well…


  2. I feel like adaptations should enhance the words on the page, not depend on them. For instance, the film adaptation of It’s Kind of a Funny Story doesn’t necessarily adhere closely to the book, but it’s still a successful adaptation for bringing the pages to life.

    Saying that Breaking Dawn is a good movie because the book was good is irrelevant. As a film, it really wasn’t well done, and frankly it was kind of boring. As far as living up to the expectations of Twilight fans (admittedly I enjoy killing some time with the movies), it was passable, but I’m critiquing this from the perspective of someone who may have never seen a Twilight movie, and not from the perspective of a fan.


  3. I never said it was a good movie. You just tore into it so much it bruised my ego a bit. And when you’re a fan of a novel, you expect more from the film. It was disappointing. The actors chosen were poor choices and Kristen Stewart, is a lame excuse for an actress. I’m just pointing out that when you’re a fan of a book series you expect the same experience. When it came down to it the story was almost exactly the same. It didn’t disappoint in that aspect. You state that’s it’s overly serious. And I can agree. Because the series was overly serious. I don’t think it’s fair of you to be so harsh if you’ve never given the novel a chance. I’m not sure if you have. I can agree the acting is horrible but, I can not agree that the story line was bad. Just rubbed me the wrong way is all. I had an opinion against yours. But the bashing and ripping it to shreds pissed me off from a fan point of view.


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