Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II, Our National Nightmare Ends

In my defense, the last movie I saw before this was Life of Pie which is an excellent movie and which I recommend you see right away and in 3D. Maybe I'll write a review of that another time because it's definitely worthy of one.

Until then, I have to share this experience with all of you because I think you'll appreciate it.

I convinced my friend M to go see this with me. She hadn't seen any of the movies or read the books and I had only seen Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse because, well, Redbox exists, so neither of us really knew what was going on. Before the movie started, M turned to me and, in jest, said, "This better be good or I want my money back." I turned back and said, "Oh, it won't be. Did I not make that clear?"

Though I was disappointed to learn that I had missed all the good baby-attempting-to-eat-Bella-during-her-pregnancy-and-then-ripping-out-of-her-v-jay-jay action, there was still plenty of bad to go around in this convoluted conclusion to our nationally revered abstinence porn.

The plot of this movie is stupid, but here's quick recap, Edward and Bella have their darling baby Renesmee (snicker, snicker) and Bella has just turned into a vampire but doesn't have problems with munching on humans because she's awesome like that. Then some random, blonde vampire chick from another movie that I don't know sees Edward, Bella, Renesmee, and Jacob (Renesmee's babysitter/future husband because wtf?) frolicking in a meadow. Random blonde chick immediately jumps to the conclusion that Bedward turned a random girl into a vampire and rushes to the Voltari (because that's a crime). The Voltari say they'll kill her right away, but then wait like five months because, I don't know, maybe there's more of a legislative process to the Voltari then we get to see? Like they have to filibuster the idea and get it passed through the Voltari house and senate or something?

In the end, Bedward gathers all these random vampires to share the story that Renesmee isn't immortal, she's just like half vampire and has some powers that we don't really know about because no one bothers to explain it and makes no sense anyway. But then the Voltari show up anyway and then they . . . talk a lot. And then they have a fight which didn't really happen because it was just Alice's vision. And then the movie ends.

What struck me most about this movie, other than the surprising amount of beheadings from this previously tame cinematic romp, and other than a line where Bella screams, "You nicknamed my daughter after the Loch Ness monsters!" which made a hilarious amount of NO SENSE to anyone who didn't see the previous movie, is just how much it sounds like everything I wrote when I was twelve.

Let's do a check list, shall we?

1. Stupid character names that have no relation to each other. (Carlisle? Jasper? Renesmee? Does Smeyer use babynames.com too?)
2. Giving the main character too many powers to make them super awesome to the point of ridiculousness. (Bella can control her hunger and she's a "Shield" which means she can cancel out all other vampire powers.)
3. Taking a genre with a long history and making up stupid rules. (Vampires can only die from fire/beheading? They don't have laws about killing random people all the time but freak out when you turn one baby? Half vampire babies age until they're seven and then stop forever? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?)
4. Stupid love story with other love interest that obviously was never going to get the girl.

Seriously, number one kills me. There aren't enough synonyms in the English language, or in any language, to properly quantify the stupidity of the name Renesmee. I once wrote a story set in the magical medieval ages with a character named named Julie who went by "Dagger", so I know stupid character names when I see them.

But, the absolute worst part of this movie is the end. I mean, we finally FINALLY get a decent fight scene in this vampire trilogy (quadrology?) that I sort of cared about a little bit. I mean, Carlisle gets his head ripped off, Dakota Fanning gets all killed and stuff, and some werewolves that I didn't know because they stayed in wolf form the entire damn time died. That was kind of sad and emotionally affecting  Then, after it's all over, we zoom in to Alice touching the lead Voltari's face and realize it was all a vision. It's the worst narrative technique ever, it really is. You don't want to make a portion of your story null and trick your audience in the same breath.

THEN we have a random half-vampire baby from the Arctic or some shit show up and say that he aged until he was seven and is currently 150 years old. WTF? Do the Voltari really have that limited control and knowledge of their world? Shouldn't they have known that Renesmee wasn't a turned child? Shouldn't they have acted before like ten months passed? Goddamn! Why isn't this called Deus Ex Machina: The Movie.

Anyway, this movie sucks, but it's fun to see with someone whose as lost and baffled by it as you. I recommend waiting until it gets to the cheap seats. (There's a cheap seat theater near where I live that sells beer. That would be ideal.)

However, if they ever decide to make a spin off series called The Voltari Doing Badass Evil Things, I hope the creative team will give me a call because I would like to write them a screenplay. No kidding, the Voltari are my favorite characters. Watching them behead people is less puke inducing then Bedward's bizarrely chaste sex scenes. (Oo, Bella's face, Edward's thighs, and feet at the end of the bed. Hott.)

My 12-year-old self gives this movie 3 stars. Only three though, because I've never written a lead female character that was that useless . . . or that boring.