The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

If you're one of those Twihards, then Eclipse should have everything you'll probably love - lots of Bella and Edward moments, a love triangle, character revelations, vampire-werewolf rivalry, revenge in the name of love, unrequited love, sacrifice in the name of love and many more acts of, or relating to, love. If you're a Twilight sceptic (bless you), the best I can say is prepare yourselves for the longest two hours of your lives.

As we know, Eclipse picks up where the second movie, New Moon, left off. Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is back together with the love of her life - the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Things are seemingly back to normal, except that her newly-formed, tight-knit friendship with werewolf, Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) while Edward was away in New Moon creates a tension between the vampire and werewolf. This places Bella in a love triangle - torn between her love for Edward and confused feelings for Jacob. Meanwhile, Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger when Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings, headed by malicious vampire Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard), who builds an army of new vampires to attack the Cullens and finally get to Bella. Adding up to her troubles, Bella's high school graduation is fast approaching, and she is confronted with the most important decision of her life - mortality or immortality? Gasp!

To be as objective as possible, let's forget for a moment that Eclipse is part of this huge franchise with an avid cult-like following, and just a regular feature film about vampires and werewolves co-existing with humans in a small American town - is it a good movie? Not really.

I mean no offence to Twihards, but I thought Eclipse was just awful - the "jokes" were unfunny, unnecessary scenes seemed to go on for far too long, and everything was too overly dramatic, even for a Twilight movie. Every line delivered had to be some big speech with lots of pauses and intense eye contact, and this wasn't only from Edward, whom you'd expect long, cheesy lines from. I've seen both Twilight and New Moon, so I'm familiar with the tone and mood in which the story takes place, but I don't remember these movies being nearly as torturing to sit through!

Maybe director David Slade deserves some credit for the action-packed fight scenes in this movie, which I wish the movie had more of that would make up for the tiresome Bella-Edward love scenes (that get a bit saucy in this film too!). In fact, if I had things my way, I'd get rid of Bella and Edward completely but keep the rest of the Cullens, the werewolves and the evil vampires to make one kick ass action-fantasy flick! But you can't always get what you want.

Needless to say, this is yet another Twilight movie only fans of the film and its actors can truly enjoy. Watch only if you know you can sit through two hours of lovey-dovey romance and naked torsos without wanting to shoot someone.

Cast Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Bryce Dallas Howard, Billy Burke, Dakota Fanning Director David Slade Runtime 120 Minutes Opens 8 July

Text: Syarifah Syazana