If you're looking for great cinema, or great story-telling, you don't look to Twilight: Eclipse. That's not what it's for.
Straight off the top: I'm obviously not of the demographic at which it was very specifically and, I might add, masterfully, aimed. As a piece of marketing to grab that romantic young girl, it is an admirable work of art and I sweep my hat off to it. Kristen Stewart in the lead is Everygirl: not pretty, but strangely engaging to look at. She never wears anything provocative or sexy, even when her friends do. All the beautiful boys fall madly in love with her, but it's HER they're loving, not any surface appearance. It very cleverly figures out a way to get her into the arms of both her vampire-love and her werewolf-love, once in the same tent, that is simultaneously innocent and exciting. Her vampire-love is so gallant that he will not sleep with her, even when she offers, although he makes it clear it is not from lack of passion.
Adolescent boys: if you want to know what an adolescent girl's perfect fantasy is, study this film. There's a lot of long, earnest conversation and long, soul-searching gazes, lots of churning, unfulfilled desires. Both her loves are simultaneously blood-lustingly dangerous and milquetoast safe, and both entirely focused on her. Indeed, her vampire-love seems to have no particular life when she's not in the room. He's got vampire roommates, I mean, but he seems to snap into focus only when she walks into view.
There is no tiresome delving into the social problems of modern teenagers. All exploration is into, around, and emerging from the heroine's somnambulistic romance-extraordinaire, as if the rest of the world existed only as adjunct and support to that single, all-important cathexis. In that sense, it reminds me a bit of an old Neil Jordan fantasy called the Company of Wolves, which was a strange, dreamlike amalgam of lycanthropic fairy tales, all taking place in the mind of a feverish girl sloughing off her girlish skin to step into womanhood. It was flawed (too slow and episodic and with one disastrous piece of casting), but in truly unique ways. Twilight, on the other hand, is admirable in that its flaws are only flaws if viewed from outside the intended perspective: that is, the perspective of the adolescent girl simultaneously eager to step into her womanhood and afraid of the gravity of the step.
(The down side is that girls learning how to live their loves from this mythology are going to be slammed hard up against some harsh realities when they find out that real boys are nothing like these polite super-boyfriends. But that's another problem for another generation, and I'm not even going to step into that morass. Anyway, when did Hollywood ever bother with such niceties as worrying about the psychological development of an audience?)
The mise-en-scene is suitably dark and brooding, with vast, rich landscapes (where is that? Someplace on the Washington coast?) and unconvincing but enjoyable CGI wolves. I watched it because the trailer showed that full-speed, howling battle-clash of a line of wolves smashing up against a line of vampires. I'm a sucker for a thing like that, and I enjoyed it, but the thing I enjoyed most was that someone, presumably a fully grown adult, is so wholly in touch with her inner teenager that she can write a thing like this from the heart, which I suppose is why it's so vastly successful.
What it is not, of course, is an action film, nor is it a horror film. It's one thing: a Girl-Fantasy, and if you look for anything else in it you will gnash your teeth in disappointment.
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