The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) & The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

Did you think I’d just talk about one Twilight movie? Did you think it was over yesterday? Oh no baby we’re doing the whole damn series!!!! And yes, after the first movie, the next movies are all titled “The Twilight Saga: (NAME)”, because I guess Summit Entertainment didn’t think the fan base would understand it was a Twilight movie unless they literally put “Twilight” in the name?! They also abandon a lot of the style and themes that Hardwicke set up. The green hues, the piano theme song, & the female gaze is all gone.

Anyway, after the first movie wildly outperformed Summit’s expectations and made them millions of dollars in one weekend, they greenlit the sequel and ‘replaced’ director Catherine Hardwicke with American Pie director Chris Weitz (the assumption was that the studio wanted to release the next movie within a year and Hardwicke wanted more time to adapt the story). In Twilight 2 — New Moon, Taylor Lautner gets buff, is officially a werewolf, and is still not indigenous! They cast tons of indigenous actors in supporting roles, but not the lead (aka the lead’s salary). Pattinson and Stewart were officially dating in real life, but in the movie Edward goes super emo and tries to die, for reasons I don’t really understand, whatever who cares. The king of camp Michael Sheen shows up as a villain though, and that’s fun!

Twilight 3 — Eclipse was directed by David Slade, someone with actual experience with horror movies, and they replaced Quebec actress Rachelle Lefevre with Bryce Dallas Howard as the villainous Victoria. Rude! In this movie Jacob goes full incell and does a sex assault but the movie plays it as romantic! Edward goes full coercive-control boyfriend but the movie plays it as romantic! They continue to appropriate indigenous culture! I can’t tell why this ‘story’ needed two movies to be told. Do they even have themes? At some point, Edward proposes to Bella and she’s like OKAY! But they can’t have sex yet.

Read more about the whole franchise over here!