_Watching the opening wedding scene in Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 is like being a guest at your friend’s friends’ wedding. You don’t belong there, and you frankly don’t give a shit about the copious amounts of toasts occurring. You just want to get to the free booze and maybe make out with a cute groomsmen on the dance floor. Is that too much to ask for? Yes, yes it is. Because instead of a beautiful film with nuance and complexities and fun, Breaking Dawn is a boring, slow film that is laughably awful at several parts. When will Hollywood understand that splitting a film into two parts is quite possibly the worst idea. It makes for the first half to feel completely unfinished and lacking, not the gripping cliffhanger they (or rather, their pockets) anticipate.

Read more after the jump!

_As you may recall from my Eclipse and New Moon reviews, I’m not the biggest fan of the Twilight franchise. But I’m the only writer on this site that actually has a vagina, so I’m deemed the designated Twilight reviewer. It’s not that I can’t get behind a cheesy, teen vampire romance. Trust me, I absolutely adore The Vampire Diaries, as silly and guilty pleasure-y as it is. And I’ve even TRIED to read the first Twilight book just to see what all the hooplah was about. My problem is this: Stephenie Meyer is a terrible writer. Absolutely fucking awful. And all of the crazy Christian overtones of her books are extremely problematic for me. This all translates to movies with terrible dialogue and lots of longing looks that basically spell out how sex equals death.

Plus I think Edward (Robert Pattinson) is creepy as shit. Seriously.

Anyhoo. Now that I got that out of the way (why does Twilight infuriate me SO MUCH?), on to Breaking Dawn! For those of you who haven’t read all the books a bajillion times and wrote about it in your diary, the film picks up where Eclipse left off with Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward getting engaged. Breaking Dawn quickly welcomes us to their wedding, where everyone is all smiles except for Jacob (Taylor Launter, doing some REAL ACTING, DAMMIT), who’s brooding and all preachy about Bella and Edward not getting it on because he might hurt her (that’s what we call a metaphor, folks). Cut to honeymoon, and they do, indeed, do the nasty, and what do you know? Bella totally gets preggers, and because it’s a vampire baby, it grows all crazy fast and hurts her.

Because this baby is basically a monster, all of wolf pack and the Cullen vampire family are concerned and argue over what to do while Bella refuses an abortion even though it would save her own life (oh, are metaphors too hard to spell out anymore when it comes to abortion, Stephenie Meyer? Get it folks, abortions are bad. Period). I digress. There’s lot of scenes of arguing, some bad CGI, some telepathic wolves, lots of brooding, Bella looking all sullen and needing a hairbrush, and that’s it really. Because, while yes, we do see the bloody birth, nothing really happens in this film. It’s a lot of talking and a lot of Kristen Stewart rubbing her belly because that’s what ALL pregnant women do ALL THE TIME.

It’s difficult to write a Twilight review because all the people who are about to camp out for midnight showings could care less what a non-devotee thinks of their precious Bella and Edward. But for me, sitting in the theater about to see The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 gave me the same chills I felt waiting for the Ke$ha concert to start (hey, I got free tickets), which is that I felt scared for the future generation of young girls. But at least Ke$ha is entertaining with her metric tons of glitter. Breaking Dawn is slow, boring, and offers nothing but stilted acting, wooden dialogue, and awful CGI effects.

--Darcie Duttweiler