Kurt Loder at MTV News:
“Eclipse” might be as good as the “Twilight” films are going to get. The main actors have settled comfortably into their roles in this third installment of the franchise. Jackson Rathbone, Nikki Reed and Ashley Greene, the more interesting of the home-team vampires, have a welcome new prominence, and Robert Pattinson even has a scene in which he displays a twinge of character-development. The movie also has some actual action, as everyone must know by now — a big vampires-versus-vampires-versus-werewolves battle sequence at the end of the picture.
However, having imposed something like narrative clarity on the story, new director David Slade is still stuck with the story — which, deriving as it does from the paceless goop of Stephenie Meyer’s books, and having been wrestled into a script by Melissa Rosenberg, is a threadbare quilt of pre-teen romantic clichés padded out unconscionably with long character flashbacks and rambling dialogue that’s deader than any of the vampires in attendance. (The picture runs two hours, and might have been more enjoyable — and certainly less exasperating — if it had been cut down into a one-hour TV special.)
We begin where the last movie left off, with chaste young lovers Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Pattinson) nuzzling in a sunlit flowery field. She’s reading him poetry. He’s glistening a bit, as the “Twilight” vampires ridiculously do whenever they’re out and about in the daytime. He asks her to marry him. “Change me,” she replies — meaning, turn her into a vampire, too. He doesn’t want to do this. But we already know that, and we wish he’d just get over it and get it over with, because we’ve been through this wearying routine before, and we know lots more of it lies ahead.
Read the full review here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.