Reviews for Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 have been so gleeful in their derision, it reminds one that critics love nothing better than a chance to sneer. Edward looks like a marble statue covered in talc, only now he’s in shorts! The wolves argue with each other in English, not even wolf-talk, which is just silly!
And let’s face it, if you’re going to have a caesarean, it’s not a good idea to have vampires in the room. But if Twilight is so awful, why do we invest so much effort into slagging it off? Especially since everything that needs to be said about teen chastity and female passivity has already been trotted out in response to previous entries in the franchise.
No matter that movies aimed at boys feature superpowers or super-robots. Those sorts of fantasies are permissible even when the films peddling them are awful. Twilight caters to the sexual fantasies of teenage girls. At least it caters to them, and there’s not a lot else at the cinema that does - not in a young adult fantasy genre that invariably reduces females to decorative sidekicks while the Harry Potters get on with their questing.
The Twilight effect is already discernible, in the new wave of fairytale movies - all featuring heroines spunkier than your traditional Disney princesses. We’ve had Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood and there are two new Snow Whites. Next spring, we have The Hunger Games, which sees a resourceful heroine in a dystopian life-or-death situation. But would even the first Hunger Games have been made without Twilight? Breaking Dawn is a small price to pay.
{{/usCountry}}The Twilight effect is already discernible, in the new wave of fairytale movies - all featuring heroines spunkier than your traditional Disney princesses. We’ve had Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood and there are two new Snow Whites. Next spring, we have The Hunger Games, which sees a resourceful heroine in a dystopian life-or-death situation. But would even the first Hunger Games have been made without Twilight? Breaking Dawn is a small price to pay.
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