The sweetest movie in the saga.

Rating: 4/10 (26 March 2020)

This film was based on a series of "best seller" books about the romance between a vampire and a young human. I never read the books (nor do I intend to), but if Edward and Bella's love story was supposed to be epic, something didn't work. Despite this, this film was, like its predecessors, a box office champion, teenagers consumed it well and the studio rubbed its hands with satisfaction.
The plot boils down to this: after defeating Victoria and her army, Edward and Bella decide to get married, much to Jacob's sadness. But something goes wrong on the honeymoon in Brazil and Bella reveals symptoms of pregnancy, which makes no sense since vampires shouldn't be able to have children. The speed of development of the fetus and the aggressive way it is sucking the energies and nutrients from Bella's body makes everyone fear for her life, and for the nature of the being she carries.
The new director is Bill Condon, who to me is a stranger. Unlike its direct predecessor, it replaces the action and the fight scenes with a certain cinematic sense and a growing tension that helps to mitigate the excessive sweetness of the story and make the film tolerable. In fact, I think this is the most sweet and sugary film in the saga, which was a negative point. The action reaches its climax in the delivery scene, one of the best in the saga, and the ending was very well achieved. The pace of the film is also much more balanced than its direct predecessor, although it is still slow.
Despite everything, the film still has problems inherited from previous films. Each film accentuates the feeling that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were casting errors. With a few exceptions (the wedding scene, the sex scene, the birth scene) there is almost no chemistry between them. There is, in fact, a general improvement in their performance, but Stewart still has to work on her lack of facial expression. Pattinson has also improved a lot and helped to give strength and passion to Edward and Bella's romance (finally!). Taylor Lautner, who started the saga well and grew, eclipses itself throughout this film, perhaps the result of the loss of relevance of his character. The actor is not to blame, he proved to be better than he is here, but he cannot do better when the material given to him by the screenwriter sucks, and that was a constant problem in the saga films. If there was anyone who, throughout the entire saga, signed a certificate of incompetence and imbecility, it was Melissa Rosenberg. The secondary cast maintains the positive level of previous films. Billy Burke and Ashley Greene are very good, as are Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Nikki Reed, Maggie Grace and Booboo Stewart.
Technically, the film maintains the good CGI, visible in the work of the wolves but is more discreet in its visual and computational resources than the previous film. The soundtrack this time is signed by Carter Burwell and is very good. Good scenarios, props, and very good images of large-scale landscapes complete the technical work. I particularly liked the cinematography of scenes with the wedding or the sex scene, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen in cinema, without excessive nudity, proving that it is not necessary to show "the thing happening" to make a good sex scene in cinema.
This film is the most romantic in the franchise, and the initial half is just honey, making us sick to the point of almost giving up on seeing the rest. It greatly improves the medium to the end, with the introduction of elements of tension and increasing danger to temper the excessive sweetness and to mask the failures of the main actors.