Some Good Ideas, but Still Awful

Rating: 3/10 (25 August 2016)

Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 follows Bella and Edward as they get married and embark on their honeymoon, only to find new trouble has occurred.
There were a handful of parts of this movie that I liked. When characters became unhealthy, they looked unhealthy. They actually looked really good in this particular instance. Otherwise there were a couple ideas that I thought were, although poorly explained at times, pretty cool and unpredictable.
Other than that, this movie suffers in almost every way the previous ones did. As per usual, we get some terrible performances from our three main leads. I don't know if I'm getting used to them or what, but I don't mind their acting as much anymore. Except Taylor Lautner, he still sucks big-time. Kristen Stewart was alright though. I think. She wasn't as annoyingly bad at acting as she was in the previous movies at least. Robert Pattinson is still better, but not by much. There was one performance that really stood out to me, however, and that was the one committed by Booboo Stewart. This was seriously one of the worst performances I've ever seen. He reminded me of Kristen Stewart's worst moments from the first movie, but it was all the time. He delivered these extremely cliché and overused lines with as much personality as a dying boulder. Try to imagine that.
I can't tell if the writing still sucks or if I'm used to it, but I think it's gotten better. Not much better, as proved by the lines written for Booboo Stewart's character, but it wasn't so unbearably or hilariously awful as it was previous.
The special effects still suck. The wolves themselves look like garbage. And then there was a baby made with CGI for some reason. I remembered hearing about that, but I could not have prepared myself for that. It looked hilariously fake. I loved it. It was probably the best part of the movie.
One thing in particular that really confuses me is the fact that everyone keeps saying that if a vampire were to engage in sexual intercourse with a human that it'd be dangerous, and yet I don't recall anyone ever stating why or how, or even stating that until someone just started saying it like everyone already knew it. A handful of other things were poorly or never explained at all, but this was the biggest thing.
And the make-up. Normally I wouldn't look at this, but the Cullens were super pale in all the previous movies and now they aren't. They're still pale, but not nearly as pale as before. They actually look human. In the previous movies it was hard to care for these characters because they didn't look real, and in turn they fit the exaggerated character stereotypes that they embodied. Now they look human, yet still maintain these personalities, which makes it hard to take them seriously as characters in a serious movie. They fit better in a Japanese anime than a live-action supposedly serious American movie like this one. Furthermore, the first three movies spent time developing characters that didn't feel or look like people, so in my mind that's exactly what they weren't. And now they're being treated like well-developed characters and it just doesn't work. The sudden shift doesn't make any real sense within the story, but I guess that's what you get with a new director for every movie.
Overall Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 has some good ideas, but it fails on every level the ones before it did. It's like a turd with ice cream on the other side of it. There's some good stuff, but you have to push through the crap to get to it. It's good for a Twilight movie, but that doesn't mean that it's actually good. In the end I wouldn't recommend this movie.