Cast: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Ashley Greene, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Xavier Samuel; Director: David Slade; Producers: Wyck Godfrey, Greg Mooradian, Karen Rosenfelt; Screenwriters: Stephanie Meyer, Melissa Rosenberg; Music: Howard Shore; Editor: Art Jones, Nancy Richardson; Genre: Fantasy/ Romance/ Thriller; Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe; Distributor: Summit Entertainment; Location: Vancouver, Canada; Running Time: 124 mins;Technical Assessment: 3.5
Moral Assessment: 3.5
CINEMA Rating: For viewers 14 and above
The message of Eclipse
By Teresa R. Tunay, OCDS
Jacob is hot about Bella, Bella is hot about Edward, Edward is keeping his cool until he marries Bella. Champions of chastity should know how to use the movie to advance their cause.
SYNOPSIS. The police are perplexed by inexplicable disappearance of otherwise ordinary and peaceful citizens from several counties around Forks, Washington. They suspect that these people have been attacked by wolves. The truth is they’re being “recruited”. The redhead vampire Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her new vampire-lover Riley (Xavier Samuel) are creating an army of “newborns”—freshly bitten humans-turned-vampires—by abducting and ambushing these mortals and sinking their fangs into their victims’ necks. Victoria wants to wipe out the Cullens and the mortal teenager Bella (Kristen Stewart) to avenge the death of her true love James. Newborns are supposedly much stronger than vampires who’ve been around for decades, thus the Cullens admit that even in number alone they are no match against the plasma-thirsty newborns. Bella’s sweetheart Edward (Robert Pattinson) and her admirer Jacob (Taylor Lautner) are left with no choice but to make a truce and combine forces to protect Bella from Victoria and her neophyte but plasma-hungry recruits.
REVIEW. Now it’s not just vampires against werewolves. It’s bad vampires against good vampires collaborating with werewolves while the inscrutable Volturi, the vampires’ ruling council, watch from the bleachers. Interesting? You bet.
The action is Eclipse’s edge over the first two movie versions of Stephanie Meyer’s saga, Twilight and New Moon. With no mean thanks to CGI (computer generated images) wolves the size of well-fed lions battle lightning-quick vampires—that’s a novelty, but there are way too many swish-pan shots and quick cuts to close ups for the viewer to clearly see how the fight progresses. You see who survives the encounter but how it happens is left to your imagination; after the initial collision between werewolf and vampire, you just see one or the other dead. (Jackie Chan offers infinitely better choreography!)
Vampire to vampire combat, however, isn’t that bad; action is sustained until one emerges as victor. One thing about this movie: the carnage is bloodless. When a werewolf is killed, you just see a dead animal, period—a slaughterhouse is definitely bloodier. Even when a vampire is decapitated, no blood flows out of the wound—just crushed ice, like that which spills out of your freezer when you clumsily empty it. (That can’t be said of Ninja movies where blood flows like a leaking fire hydrant.)
So, if only for the stylized and bloodless violence, maybe some would rate Eclipse like a cartoon—funny enough for young children—but if you examine the primary storyline, perhaps you might see it’s dangerous for teenagers. And immature adults.
The story, plain and simple, is a dime-a-dozen romance involving two males and a female. But the Meyer mythos lends the love-triangle a different coloration—one male is a vampire, the other is a werewolf and since according to the novelist vampires and werewolves are by instinct (im)mortal enemies, the rivalry between the two over the human female consequently offers more dynamic interaction than if all three belonged to species homo sapiens.
Minus the vampire-werewolf backdrop, Eclipse is but a story of lust—suppressed and unrequited lust. Putting it nicely in teen lingo, Jacob is hot about Bella, Bella is hot about Edward, Edward is keeping his cool until he marries Bella. One male teenage viewer coming out of the theater was overheard, “Puro Bella, Bella, Bella, nakaka-irita!” (It’s all about Bella, it’s irritating!) But that can’t be helped, considering that novelist Meyer’s intention is really to focus on chastity—and what better way to make chastity shine than to set it deep against a swirling mass of dark, overpowering emotions?
Bella is a self-absorbed teen-ager searching for her identity, a virgin who has fallen in love with a vampire and wants to give herself totally to him, now. But Edward is pat on his principles so he tells Bella: marry me first. Gripped by incomprehensible passions, she rejects Edward’s stand as “ancient” but hangs on to him anyway, while remaining ambivalent about Jacob, her muscular, shirtless admirer. She says she’s in love with Edward but wouldn’t let go Jacob—what a tease. Bella may be in love with Edward, but she’s also in love with the idea of being in love with a vampire, and is beguiled by the prospect of being forever 18.
What Bella doesn’t seem to realize—let alone be willing to admit—is that it is lust controlling her this time. She keeps Jacob around to boost her ego which is repeatedly bruised by Edward’s constant refusal to yield to her sexual availability. When Bella kisses Jacob in plain view of Edward, she probably has in mind, “Look, Eddie Boy, if you don’t want me, somebody else badly does!” When Edward says, “You love him (Jacob)”, and she answers “I love you more”, she could be thinking, “Yeah, Jake’s got gorgeous pecs, but yours glisten in the sun!” So, what is Bella really after?
Jacob is after Bella—has always been since Twilight, through New Moon—though it’s doubtful whether he wants Bella for her own good. Cocksure about Bella’s covert feelings for him, he’s much too wrapped up in his desires to even begin to know what Bella really wants. His consistent sales pitch to Bella is You’re-a-fool-for-wanting-him-when-I’m-better-for-you, uttered in various versions but almost always with a wolfish growl. Jacob’s smugness borders on the ridiculous when he says to Edward, “I’m hotter than you!” Yeah, we know it’s because werewolves are supposed to be warm-blooded while vampires are made of ice inside, but, Attention, please!—his close-up shot here reveals Lautner really meant it for Pattinson, not for Edward. Hot and hotter—such is the name of the showbiz game.
If Meyer’s point in her saga is upholding chastity, she uses the century-old vampire Edward to advance her cause. His decisions and actions show it, and his lines are unequivocal. Edward, despite multiple graduations from high school through the decades, still ticks with the mores of his times—when a man courted a woman, asked her father for her hand in marriage, and kept the fire in his loins under control until the wedding night. Of the three characters in the love triangle, Edward is the one who loves most selflessly, putting the welfare of his beloved above his own. As Jacob is to realize in time, Edward is a gentleman’s gentleman, willing to let Bella go should she opt to be with another man.
Before you decide whether to align yourself with Team Edward or Team Jacob, remember it’s only a movie. Engaging though it is, like a telenovela to many people, this vampiric business is still fiction. At the rate Eclipse is drawing crowds (eight out of 12 movie theaters in a popular mall is showing Eclipse, with the 2D version selling tickets at 400 pesos each), a reality check is in order. To prevent yourselves from getting carried away by this Gothic romance, ponder these silly concerns:
--If vampires are made of ice inside, does it follow that whatever they eat become frozen in there?
--If these bloodsuckers don’t bleed, what has happened to all that blood they’ve swallowed for eons?
--If vampires and werewolves can come to a truce for the sake of a loved one, does this mean there’s hope for the war freaks of our world?
--Since vampires claim being a vampire is a curse they don’t want, then why do they still defend themselves when attacked? Why not just allow themselves to be killed? Or is suicide a no-no for vampires?
--On what day of creation did God create vampires and werewolves?
--Is this movie safe for young children? Answer: Parents who let their 3-year-old watch Twilight on DVD with them were aghast when guests asked the child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and the kid gleefully replied, “I wanna be a vampire!”
Eclipse offers much to discuss at home or in school; church workers, take note. Fiction though it is, the fact that young people are trooping to the theaters to watch Eclipse means they resonate somehow with the movie’s content. They may identify with the characters, or recognize their own demons in the tug-of-war between the characters.
The tug-of-war is not between Jacob and Edward, but between Bella and Edward (lust and chastity), between Bella and herself (to want or to wait), and between the two brats Bella and Jacob—(I want what I want now!). The message in Eclipse is, really, “True love waits.” It is Edward’s stand. Isn’t it ironic that it should come from a vampire? Young people pay over and over again to hear that message—if champions of chastity see that as the factor behind Robert Pattinson’s instant stardom, they should know how to use it to advance their cause. Bella may have said Edward’s spiel for chastity is “ancient” without realizing she spoke the truth. The virtue is “ancient” because it has survived generations of vice; and it has survived because deep within the human heart, chastity is the desire of all ages.
(The author is Founding Board Member of the CBCP/CINEMA)
