The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) - De ja vu starts to set in

Believe it or not, I actually quite enjoyed the original 'Twilight' - not enough to ever really want to watch it again, but it passed a couple of hours.  I always think it was a bit of a victim of its own success.  It was so popular the people who made it realised they had to drag out of the story no matter what.

In the original, a young teenage girl, Bella Swann, moves to a small American town where she falls in love with a local vampire, Edward Cullen.  Yeah, it's a bit cheesy and mainly aimed at 'young adults', but, like I say, it killed a couple of hours.  The trouble was that the film has to end when the protagonists get together.  Therefore, with a romance film, if you're going to make a sequel you then have to come up with new ways of keeping them apart.

'Eclipse' is now the third entry in the series and even the second one was a bit of a stretch as to why these people who were so 'completely in love' should be apart.  It plays heavily on a - supposed - 'love triangle' with a werewolf character, Jacob, and, at the time time release, there was plenty of hype in the media about whether you were on 'Team Edward' or 'Team Jacob.' Again, the whole point of the trilogy (to date of release of this film) was for Edward and Bella to get together, therefore it's hard to believe she'd suddenly ditch the vamp for the wolf.

Now, maybe all this wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the characters themselves are just so one dimensional.  Bella is played by Kristen Stewart and Edward by Robert Pattinson who, believe it or not, both can actually act.  It took a while for these two young actors to shake off their typecasting and show they could do more than just stare at each other with mouths slightly open.  Plus, for a film (mainly?) designed for young teenage girls, I do find a lot of Bella's decisions pretty, er, 'suspect' in her eternal quest for love - hardly a good role model in my opinion.  In fact, she's a bit of a 'Mary Sue' where everyone loves her despite her complete lack of personality and even being pretty selfish.

I know there are a lot of teens who love this franchise and every installment.  I'm just not a teen any more and was never really that romantic to begin with, therefore this just seemed to be flogging an undead horse a little too far.  My sixteen year old daughter would completely disagree.  She's probably going to make me watch parts four and five soon.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back