Book Vs. Movie: Eclipse
By Russ Bickerstaff
July 1, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Twilight: Eclipse
Stephenie Meyer had a dream about a guy with sparkly skin. Most people would’ve forgotten about it and gone on with their day, but Meyer ended up writing a series of highly successful novels inspired by the visual of that dream. The first-time novelist followed Twilight with New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn. The first two novels have been turned into a pair of movies, grossing over $1 billion worldwide. Not bad considering the production budgets for both films combined only totaled something like $100 million. Naturally, there are plans for three more movies based on the final two novels in the series. The latest (Eclipse) has just opened. Though there has been a different director for each film in the series (the director this time around is David Slade of hard Candy and 30 Days Of Night,), screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg and much of the cast have remained consistent. Coming out just a half a year after the second film in the series, Eclipse is the mid-way point in what is planned to be a cinematic pentalogy based on the four-book series. How does the (thus far) hugely successful film series compare with the hugely successful book halfway in?
The Book
Stephanie Meyer’s third novel in the Twilight series is her third published novel overall, so it is likely she hasn’t had much distance from the characters from the characters in many thousand words of printed prose. With the third novel (published just three years ago), she seems to be as comfortable as ever with the characters. These are characters she writes about with a great deal of affection - old friends she’s gotten to know over a three or four-year period. By the time Meyer is sitting down to write Eclipse, the characters have helped to make her a huge success. It would be very difficult not to pick-up on this in Meyer’s prose, which focuses a great deal on interpersonal conversations and internal monologues.
The story so far: female protagonist high school student Bella Swan has moved cross-country to be with her father, who lives in the tiny, darkened town of Forks, Washington. In and amidst the general awkwardness of starting life in a new town and getting to know people in a new school, Bella ends-up falling in love with a vampire named Edward. It’s kind of a stormy relationship at first, slowly developing with the action and danger one would expect from a world of vampires and, as it turns out, werewolves. The second novel in the series expands on the natural animosity between werewolves and vampires with Bella caught in the middle of it all, inevitably going to Italy and promising a powerful European governing body to become a vampire.
The third novel opens as Bella is preparing for graduation and embracing the last moments of her non-undead life. The relationship with Edward has intensified. He’s no longer uncomfortable with his love for Bella and he’s ready to literally spend the rest of eternity with her. His old-fashioned marriage values are at odds with her contemporary ones - she doesn’t want to marry straight out of high school. This is a mild stress in Bella’s life when compared against the unrequited love of a werewolf named Jacob and a vampire trying to exact revenge for the death of her mate by killing Bella.
The plot is cheap and derivative. There is very little here that hasn’t already appeared in a growing number of contemporary vampire and (to a far lesser extent) werewolf films and novels. Playing out as it does almost entirely in dialogue referencing emotions involving events that have already happened, the book feels less like a story and more like a series of talking-heads interviews about a story. Where the action is reasonably fresh, Meyer glosses over it with the same brisk rhythm she devotes to characters hashing out their feelings on a particular subject for the sixth or seventh time.
The appeal of this series as fed through this third novel in the series lies in competent, well-paced storytelling. Meyer’s affection for the characters is contagious to the right kind of readers, who have clearly taken these characters into their hearts as well. This is nothing new for episodic fiction - audience attachment to characters has driven the success of TV shows, long running film series, comic books and so on. Typically, the more enduring episodic stories have a large cast of characters that appeal to a wide range of people.
Meyer hangs the Twilight series so heavily on Edward, Bella and Jacob that any attempt she makes to draw interest elsewhere ends up coming across as unnecessary padding. Do we really need to find out the reason why a given character has become a vampire if that character has only appeared in a few scattered scenes? It’s difficult to imagine readers feeling any significant attachment to any of the characters outside of the central three, making Eclipse and the two novels to come before it a very limited trip into a long-running episodic story. There’s a rich tradition for thematically lightweight material like this in episodic fiction of every conceivable art form and genre, but the world Meyer weaves isn’t rich enough to truly get lost in unless one has a powerfully strong connection with its three principal characters. Outside of them, it’s pretty weak.
The Movie
Eclipse continues the Twilight film franchise’s track record for being reasonably faithful to Meyer’s books. Though the dialogue is, at times, every bit as bad as it’s ever been for the series, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg seems to be comfortable enough with the source material to take liberties with it where necessary in the interest of crafting a compelling story for film. It's doubtless that many of the choices in framing and pacing different plot elements were courtesy of a very competent David Slade operating as director.
The story flows much better onscreen than it does on the page. Meyer’s prose style relies quite heavily on dialogue (the entire story is told from the perspective of Bella, so even those parts of the novel that don’t happen between quotes come across as conversational.) In text, this can be quite boring, especially as Bella doesn’t seem to have a terribly interesting way of articulating things and much of the dialogue is actually pretty dry and uninteresting. By forcing the narrative out of a “Bella’s Diary” format, the film can afford to pan around and look at the world Bella seems to be missing as she obsesses over things.
Actors bring humanity to characters only briefly touched-on in extended monologues. The film includes a number of flashback scenes as members of the Cullen family tell Bella of how they came to be vampires. These work far better in the film than they do in the book. The actors’ screen presences provide a depth that draws the viewer into the story. There’s enough detail in those scenes to make each one of them work remarkably well as standalone shorts. Some of these stories have to be truncated considerably to maintain the pacing of the film. This is a far greater problem as it pertains to a rather key back-story told by a native American tribal elder. The origin of the tribe of werewolves was a bit lengthier in the novel than it ended up being here. Though it seems to have been written almost entirely without reference to actual native American history, the story made for an interesting counterpoint to the central focus on vampires.
Possibly the single most potent improvement from book to screen has to be the werewolves. With little to no decent description off the interaction between the members of the pack, they came across as minor supporting players. Even Jacob, though clearly a major source of stress, seemed more like an event than an actual person in the text of the novel.
The film opens things up considerably, giving the werewolves a potently vivid visual reality. True, they were clearly CGI creations, but the animators gave them a humanity that felt very real and visceral. And as they were paired-off against monsters who have been largely over-exposed in movies over the course of the past 20 years, it was difficult not to find them much more interesting than the vampires that were supposed to be the center of the film. Slade and company do a remarkably good job of integrating them into the action. The big fight at the end with a bunch of random vampires would’ve been catastrophically boring without well-placed, well-choreographed CGI wolves in the fray.
As nice as it is to see vampires and werewolves fighting together onscreen, the film still suffers from the central problems inherent in the novel. At its heart, this is a romance and if the romance isn’t compelling, the movie as a whole feels like a bit of a waste of time. Robert Pattinson has come a long way as Edward Cullen, but he still comes across as a pale James Dean with fangs - a perverted, overgrown Eddie Munster who has fallen in love with a piece of food. The source material doesn’t give him any easy challenges. The character simply doesn’t behave the way one would expect a nearly invincible 100-year-old man to be behaving.
Kristen Stewart is as compelling as ever, but the character she’s playing isn’t. She tumbles through the story by supernatural forces that seem to obsess over her. While she may be one of the two main characters, functionally, she’s a plot device with no real control over the world she finds herself in. Stewart seems to be a talented actress, but it’s very difficult to make the role of perpetual victim seem terribly interesting. Taylor Lautner manages to make kind of an unlikeable character in the novel come across with considerable charm, but the plot Meyer places him in doesn’t give him very much to do.
The Verdict
Stephenie Meyer’s series had lost quite a bit of speed by the time it hit the third novel. Its success is more a product of cumulative fan support than anything intrinsically interesting about the story. The product of much more than one person, the film series seems to have had the right mixture of talent over the course of the past several years to keep it fresh every time. The problem is that the plot of the third novel doesn’t broaden the appeal of the story to more people.
Grounded as it is in specifics established in the first two parts of the series, Eclipse may have more of a fan-exclusive appeal. It is unlikely that the third film will do any better than the second. The development of the series over time is lost on an audience that will love the films unconditionally regardless. It is an audience unlikely to appreciate all the efforts by cast and crew to make the story that much more engrossing to anyone not already in love with the story. This is a pity, as the story isn’t terribly good and there really is some interesting work being done here in an effort to make it appealing.