Breaking Dawn Part 2 Movie Review: A Review for Twilight Haters

Culture

Let’s get one thing out of the way: this review is not for Twilight fans. If you are a Twilight fan, go watch Breaking Dawn part 2, you’ll probably enjoy it. I’m not judgmental. You have the right to be happy. You don’t need me raining on your parade. Just leave the room and let me talk to the other guy, because I’m going to say a lot of mean things about the film.

Okay, she gone? Then I need you to do one thing for me. This is the only favor I’m going to ever ask of you: For the love of god, don't watch this thing! I’m more serious than anyone will ever be. Imagine me saying that like I’m Dr. Brown and you just told me the DeLorean needs 1.21 Gigawatts to work as a time machine. I’m bulging my eyes. Spit is flying into your face. If you’re summoned to go, find an excuse. Tell your girlfriend you have a headache, or if that doesn’t fly, hike it up to a bad case of the Black Plague. Tell her you’ve just killed a guy and needs to cool your heels for a while. You need to understand how serious this is. Watching this film is a health hazard, it compromises your spiritual connection to the world and your chance of salvation in the rapture, it throws all your chakras off-balance, it magically erases all your diplomas, it will get you fired from your job, and it's unpatriotic.

I don’t know if anyone else here on PolicyMic has already reviewed this film. If not, well, then put it down as one for the team. But before I get deeper into the review, let me talk about my experience:

One thing I hadn’t thought of when I volunteered for this task was the utter embarrassment of being a lone 27 year-old overweight guy in the middle of a bunch of bouncing teenyboppers. I was going to look like a pedophile. I was half-expecting Detectives Stapler and Benson to kick the theater door in and haul my ass up to the station for booking. It didn’t help that my clothes are all ill fitting, since I prefer to spend my money on food, and I haven’t shaved in a while so my crazy panhandler beard would put Joaquin Phoenix to shame.

Luckily, however, I bought the ticket early enough in the day that the session was pretty much empty (by Twilight standards anyhow) and there was no one else on my row, so I relaxed a bit.

I was surprised, though, to see some puberty-aged boys watching the film, including one who was sporting the meanest gentleman’s bum fluff I’d ever seen. How miserable they must have been. Their family accompanied them all, so I figured it was the sister’s day to pick the movie. I pictured them going “MO-OM, why can’t I go to the Power Rangers movie instead?” “You aren’t old enough to be in a movie theater by yourself, Little Timmy Weenie,” she points at me sitting in the front row “Look at all the weirdoes that show up in these things!”

“But I want to show my friends this bitchin’ bum-fluff I’ve been growing for ten months!”

Well, at least he could still be assured that his bum fluff is definitely better than Taylor Lautner’s bum fluff…

Wait, they still have Power Rangers movies, right?

Back to Breaking Dawn: the film started out alright, with a pleasant-sounding indie-pop ballad playing over Bella and Whatshisname being all tender to each other and stuff, after getting hitched in the last movie. It was quite efficient to convey the feeling of the couple. I was watching that and going “Wow, how tender! Maybe this film isn’t going to be so terrible after all.”

Oh… The naïvete of the innocent…

Then the whole thing totally broke pace and went downhill faster than a British guy trying to outrun a cheese wheel. From that intimate moment between the newlyweds it cuts to a scene where Bella and Whatshisface get a little peckish and decide to run around in the forest hunting down some varmints for brunch. This was the first time I noticed the CGI effects in this movie are appalling. The "running really fast" effects in this film are worse than the ones in that old 90s The Flash TV show. I could almost see the green screen behind them, and the sound guy entering the shot eating a tuna sandwich. Someone has to be embezzling money out of this. The franchise has made so much money by now that they should have enough scratch to not only do good CGI but to create an entire new technology that’s even better than computers to do the best CGI ever!

Or maybe they just know that they can wrap a turd in a newspaper and sell it for a hundred dollars if it has Stephanie Meyer’s name on it.

And what's more: The couple runs in a perfect straight line through a dense forest and never even graze a single tree!

So Bella and Whatev – Edward! That’s his name! Bella and Edward finally find themselves some prey in a clearing: A couple of deer chillin’ out. Bella, however, can’t bring herself to go for the deer because they are so wuvewy wuvy woo. It's lucky for her, then, that right at that moment a cougar shows up! Seriously ogling the poor deer in front of it! She then uses this incredible break to slay that mean ol’ crabby cougar that was going to eat those precious bundles of elegance and loveliness.

Now, I want to share some interesting facts: There are about 30,000 cougars in the U.S.

You know how many deer are there in America? 25 million! That’s a deer for every twelve people in the country! It’s becoming a serious overpopulation problem.

Well, way to go, Bella. Real conservationist you are. Maybe you want to head to China and kill some tigers next.

From then, we find that Bella has a baby now. Yay. Only it’s not really hers. And it’s a CGI baby. Boo. Looking at that computer baby was the most unsettling experience I have ever had during a film, and I’ve already watched Ichi The Killer. And what's weird is that it seems that she's still computer-generated even after she grows into a ten-year old kid.

Anyway, apparently the Italian guys who run the vampire business take exception to kids, because vampire kids start killing left and right if you don’t appease them with a trip to the Chucky Cheese or a Nintendo 3DS, and that caused real embarrassment during the middle ages (when the night sky looked like Highlander II), so Bella and the gang start mustering some buddies to bear witness that their baby ain’t like those rabble-rousers, since she was born, not bitten.

And then a lot of things happen. And I mean a lot of things. The movie throws stuff at you like it’s a self-conscious infomercial host desperately trying to sell you that complete set of eggplant peelers even though he himself justifiably has no faith in the product

There are no smooth transitions from scene to scene. The changes in tone are jarring. They go from cutesy romance to bloody action sequence like a kid showing you all the toys he has in his chest, without letting you examine a single one in particular. The storytelling in this film is to storytelling what New Coke is to Coke: An embarrassment. It doesn’t let up. The scenes feel shoehorned in there to provide an acceptable ratio of excitement/calm, turning it into a robotic and awkward display of clunky juxtaposition. The movie moves at a breakneck pace, and I was still getting bored with it!

It came to a point where I was just praying for them to throw the climatic battle at me, since it looked nice on the trailer and, more importantly, it heralds the end of my tribulations.

And what do you know? Just when I was starting to go into a coma, the big showdown! A bunch of vampire and roided up wolves gathered in the battlefield to kick the crap out of each other. I was excited. Maybe something good will come out of this, after all, and you know what? That big battle scene was surprisingly awesome. A bunch of people got beheaded, a bunch of people died and got their asses torched, lots of cool moves, YES! I was having fun!

But then something happened. Something so unbelievably dreadful and stupid that I facepalmed myself so hard, I still have the swollen hand imprint on my mug, like an Uruk-Hai warrior. I want to tell you what it is, but it’s a major spoiler, and even though it’s probably the most disappointing spoiler in the history of cinema, I feel I have to warn you. Highlight the following paragraph if you want to hear me out:

The whole thing was a fucking dream! It was a vision being projected into the main villain guy’s head to show him what would happen if they decided to fight. It didn’t happen. They pulled a Dallas on me. They threw me a Roseanne curveball. I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly I wished I had fallen asleep right in

I felt so hurt and betrayed, I wanted to find the nearest shower and curl myself under the water, completely clothed, while rocking back and forth and mumbling to myself: It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault... 

The movie was starting to feel alright. It had a chance to at least end on a high note, after all the preceding dross, and blew it all the way to a planet they haven’t even discovered yet. 

It was like I was suspecting my girlfriend of cheating on me for a while, confronted her with it, and she proved to me without a shadow of a doubt that she wasn’t. Then the next day I walk in on her doing it with my childhood bully, and yes: He is a white guy wearing a do-rag under his sideways flatbill.

This movie could endear itself to me, but it was just too much of a sadistic asshole to let that happen. It had to play me for a sucker. Well, Fuck you, Breaking Dawn part 2.