The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

The third film from Stephenie Meyer’s novels arrives with a new director and a brief to toughen things up. David Slade made Hard Candy (2005) and 30 Days of Night (2007), films in which people are hurt and the hurt shows, and he has been hired to give a series about not having sex some bite. He partly manages it. Eclipse has a villain with a plan, a battle at the end and a handful of lines that are meant to be funny and are. It is the best of the three so far, and it is still a film in which three people have the same conversation for 124 minutes.

Slade’s first scene is his best argument. A young man runs through Seattle at night, under a pier, in rain so heavy it reads as static, and something he cannot see keeps getting to him first. Javier Aguirresarobe shoots the whole film in the wet greys and greens of the Pacific coast, with the grain left in, and he lights the Cullens’ glass house, designed by Paul Denham Austerberry, so the family looks like a display in a shop window. When the vampires fight, they do not bleed. They crack and come apart like dropped crockery, and the sound of it is the film’s one properly unpleasant idea. Nancy Richardson and Art Jones cut the fights so that we can always tell who is hitting whom, which in 2010 is not a given.

Kristen Stewart is more awake than before; her Bella wants things and says so, and the film is better for it. Taylor Lautner plays Jacob as a boy who has decided honesty is a tactic, and he delivers the film’s best line, about which of them is hotter, to the right man at the right moment. Robert Pattinson spends most of the film looking pained and faintly powdered, as Edward must, and he has nothing to do but refuse. The grown-up is the one we enjoyed. Billy Burke’s Charlie, trying to talk to his daughter about being safe without saying any of the words, gave us the biggest laugh we had, and Charlie is on screen for perhaps ten minutes.

The villains are short-changed. Bryce Dallas Howard’s Victoria has red curls, a snarl and an army, and about four lines to go with them. Dakota Fanning’s Jane stands still in a black cloak and leaves. Melissa Rosenberg’s screenplay is more interested in the Cullens’ history, and gives Jackson Rathbone’s Jasper and Nikki Reed’s Rosalie each a flashback to how they died. Jasper’s, in Texas, is the most interesting five minutes in the film and is treated as a detour; it also has the hair, which has to be seen. Howard Shore scores all of this quietly, piano and low strings, and declines to tell us when to be stirred, which we respected and which does nothing for the pace.

Here is what we felt. For long stretches in the middle, when Edward asks Bella to marry him and she says not yet and Jacob asks her to choose him instead and she says she cannot, we were bored, and we noticed we were bored, and the film did not. Then, late on, there is a tent on a mountain, a girl freezing in a sleeping bag, and two men who cannot stand each other talking over her in the dark. We expected to laugh. We did not. Tish Monaghan has put one of them in a good grey coat and the other in nothing above the waist for most of the film, and the joke of that is plainest in a tent in a snowstorm, yet with nothing to do but talk, Pattinson and Lautner finally sound like two people rather than two positions. It is the only scene in which the triangle is a story.

Against Slade’s own work this is a tamed animal. 30 Days of Night understood that a vampire frightens because of what it does to a body; here the certificate is 12A and the bodies are marble, so the big fight is a lot of statues breaking. Against the series it is a clear step up from New Moon (2009), which spent an hour on a girl staring out of a window. That is a low bar, and the film clears it, and then stands there.

If you are already in, you know, and you will have a better time than last time. If you are the person being brought along, it is 124 minutes, the last twenty are the good ones, and Billy Burke will get you through the rest.