Movie Review: Breaking Dawn Part 1

Release date: November 18th, 2011

Rated: PG-13

Directed by Bill Condon

Written by Melissa Rosenberg and Stephenie Meyer

Studio: Summit Entertainment

Synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

In The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson), plus those they love, must deal with the chain of consequences brought on by a marriage, honeymoon, and the tumultuous birth of a child...which brings an unforeseen and shocking development for Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). -- (C) Summit Entertainment

Review:

I'm going to start off by saying that Breaking Dawn was by far my favorite Twilight film.  I consider myself a Twilight fan, but I'm not really a fan of the books themselves.  I'd much rather be reading well-written fanfiction about the wolves.  As far as the movies go, I've enjoyed them.  They weren't the absolute best movies, but they were entertaining.  Breaking Dawn blew me away though.  I thought it was the best shot Twilight film so far, and I'm sure Part 2 will be the same as it has the same director.

One thing that really surprised me about this movie is that I had a huge smile on my face for at least the first half hour because of how cute it was.  I don't like Edward and Bella much.  I've never really cared about them a whole lot.  Sure, I want them together, but there's so much about them as a couple that annoys me.  It bugs me how unhealthy their relationship is.  But I has a huge smile on my face during the wedding and most of the honeymoon.  I kept thinking about how adorable they were together.  That didn't happen for me in the books.

One of my favorite parts of the movie was getting to see more of the wolves.  They are by far my favorite characters.  I love getting to see more of them.  My friend Haley and I got excited everytime Seth showed up.  (I love him.)  I also loved seeing Jacob, Leah, and Seth as a pack, since their three of my favorite characters, and I love how they interact with each other.  The scene where all the unimprinted wolves (the previous three I mentioned plus Embry) were talking about imprinting was great, and I'm not just saying that because it involves my top four favorite characters.

I got way too excited at the end of the paper.  From the moment I knew Bella was about to go into labor until the end of the movie I was on the edge of my seat.  From the moment Edward tries to hand off Nessie to Jacob and he won't take her I was sitting in my seat whispering, "Oh my God.  He's going to imprint."  You can ask Haley because I'm sure she heard me.  Since it was done differently than in the books, I got a little mad when Jacob went outside instead of imprinting.  That scene was so perfect though that I got over it quickly.  Even if I was slightly worried for a minute that he wasn't going to imprint...

I'm still not sure how I feel about the "fight" scene between Sam's pack and everyone else.  I think it was well done, but I also don't think it was entirely necessary.  It did kind of let us see their reactions to Jacob's imprint though, which I guess is a plus.  And of course the fighting looked really cool.  I think it was done better than the battle in Eclipse.

The only absolutely negative thing I have to say about the movie was the wolves' voices when they were phased.  What was with that?  Having CGI wolves talking through voice-overs is going to be a little cheesy anyway.  Did they have to make it worse by adding weird effects to their voices.  Most of the time I could barely understand what they were saying, and even though I can tell most of the wolves apart (way too obsessed...), it was harder to distinguish between their voices, which would make it harder for people to follow who's who.  I think they should have just used their voices without any effects at all.  It would have worked a lot better.

I never get fangirly over Twilight unless it involves the wolves, and even then, I'm not usually this bad.  I loved Breaking Dawn though.  In addition to showing more of the wolves than I think any of the previous films have, it was also shot really well, and I think everyone who worked on it did a great job.  It's definitely my favorite Twilight movie.

I'm editing this to add a couple of things I forgot to mention.  The way they made Bella look like she was dying was amazing.  It was almost hard to watch because she really did look almost dead.  It was also really cool when they showed her turning into a vampire.  I thought that was neat.  The whole labor scene was shot really well too.  As someone who's extremely squeamish around blood, I didn't have an extremely hard time watching it, which was nice.  Hopefully I've got everything now and won't need to come back and add on to this again!

After the DVD came out, I made a post about the special features.  You can read that here.