Release Date: 9th July 2010

Rating: 2/5

Overview: The third film in the series falls short of its predecessors, and that’s saying something.

It’s that time of year again, the days are getting longer, the sun is finally coming out, all the teenage girls in the land are lusting after vampires, and I’ve been dragged to yet another instalment of the Twilight Saga. This time it’s the third part of the story and Bella and Edward are starting to grate on my nerves. I’m not sure how many more amber contact lenses and intense looks I can take.  

The story of Eclipse picks up where New Moon left off. Bella (Kristen Stewart) is still oh so in love with her vampire boyfriend Edward (Robert Pattinson) and is badgering him to change her into an immortal so she can be with him forever, cue the vomit noises. However, despite this Bella is also trying to get out of marrying Edward, which is his one demand if he is to change her into a vampire. But that isn’t the main plot line of this film; the major story is the love triangle between Bella, Edward and Bella’s friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who also happens to be a werewolf and therefore the natural enemy of any vampire. A girl stuck between a werewolf and vampire as potential marriage material? Even if you’re not into Twilight that sounds interesting, right? Wrong.

Sitting here in front of my laptop trying to remember Eclipse I’m finding I’m drawing a rather big blank. It seems as though ¾ of the film has completely disappeared. I think it’s because this was the part that was filled with the soppy conversations and endless confrontations between Bella, Edward and Jacob. These were the scenes where the aforementioned intense looks were used ad infinitum. The film felt like double the two hours running time, but nothing really happened until the last 30 minutes. I found myself constantly drifting off and thinking about kayaking (there were several shots of lakes). In fact I think the highlight of this part of the film was my sister turning to me and whispering that Jacob’s circular tribal tattoo looked like the Pizza Express logo.

I suppose I should explain why I gave this film a 2/5 instead of a 1/5. Well its redeeming qualities were the last half an hour, the Volturi or ‘bad vampires’ and Taylor Lautner who I thought made a much better job of this film than his previous two attempts. During the film there is a secondary plot line of an army of newborn vampires, incidentally when vampires are at their strongest, which is being amassed in Seattle. It is in the last 30 minutes when this army is finally unleashed and I awoke from my kayaking daydreams. It is also when the Volturi turn up. These vampires are introduced as vampire royalty and they are, in my opinion, the cooler vampires. They’re the bad ass ones who kill humans, wear black and have red eyes. Unfortunately for me these two aspects of the film had to take a back seat to the infuriatingly dull love triangle, and so the last half an hour of the film was also the best part because it was the end.

To sum up this less than enthusiastic review, here is a list of a few more things that annoyed me: Kristen Stewart’s wig was really awful, at one point it sat on her head like a lump of immovable straw and fascinated me more than anything she was saying; the whole marriage avoidance thing, you’re about to sign up to the whole of eternity with him, you might as well go the whole nine yards and marry the guy; and finally the fact that David Spade, director of 30 Days of Night and Hard Candy, managed to produce this piece of …rubbish.