Breaking Dawn Dead Awful

The latest Twilight installment is, predictably, highly popular with fans; critics are less enthusiastic as Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson continue their vampire romance.

• “Enough with Bella's depressed, ragdoll posture and her eternal gloom,” writes Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. “A pox on Breaking Dawn ... for its contented complicity with Stephenie Meyer's ultimately awful message to millions of readers”—a message that life is “all pain” and “no pleasure.”

• “Breaking Dawn kinda sucks, in the metaphoric rather than the vampiric sense,” notes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. “The film doesn't have nearly the bite—ferocious or delicious—that any self-respecting vampire movie really should."
• In Time, Mary Pols bemoans the film’s “disturbingly Victorian attitudes about sex and love.” There’s “something extraordinarily deflating about realizing that you are sitting among a throng of blissful fans content with such a static enterprise.” The only thing to celebrate here is the fact that "our death march through the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s twisted but steadily puritanical saga is finally nearing its end."
• But in a surprisingly positive review, Manohla Dargis is on the fans' side, calling this installment the best in Edward and Bella's “ridiculously appealing” love story. The movie, she writes in the New York Times, “takes the arc of human experience—birth and death and everything in between—and works it up into a rich, sudsy lather.”

(More Kristen Stewart stories.)