And that's as good (very good) as the writing gets in Eclipse, easily the least compelling, least fun entry in the saga thus far. It's not long before Bella is declaiming, "Wow, that's really pretty!" when Jacob (Taylor Lautner), the wolf boy with abs of steel, hands her a token of his love. Or later, breaking up one of the frequent spats between her dueling suitors, Bella leans in to push Edward and Jacob apart and says, "Stop! I'm tired of this. From now on, I'm Switzerland."
As in neutral territory? Or as in neutral delivery? The Twilight star's line-readings have become like Edward and his bloodsucking kin: They lack a pulse.
To be entirely accurate, Eclipse begins in the rain, in Seattle, with a prologue about a kid from Forks, Wash., who gets whizbanged by a vampire. Before long, Seattle is overrun by rampaging "newborns" - freshly minted Dracs, stronger and thirstier than the ones that have been around for centuries. What's up with that? wonder the Cullen clan back in sleepy Forks. And then Alice (Ashley Greene), the psychic sibling, susses things out: Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard), "the Redheaded One," is creating an army of newborns to take out Bella and the goody-two-shoes vampire family that protect her.
So there's the conflict in Twilight: Eclipse, and the excuse for the climactic rumble in the woods in which the newborns, all cool and sinister, square off against a wary alliance of vampires and wolves. (The wolves, CG creatures twice the size of the human actors, are pretty awesome.) And yes, Dakota Fanning and her caped and hooded Volturi, goth and goofy, watch from the sidelines.
But all of that is really beside the point. Twilight: Eclipse, directed in episodic spurts by David Slade, a Brit with a nasty teen-sex drama (Hard Candy) and a stylish vampire horror pic (30 Days of Night) to his credit, is mostly about Bella mapping out her future.
