New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

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.

Continued:       1       2       3