Andrew Cooper / Summit Entertainment 
 
 The world’s most insipid young lovers, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), finally consummate their love in Breaking Dawn—Part 1, the fourth installment in the Twilight series. This is cause for celebration only because it means our death march through the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s twisted but steadily puritanical saga is finally nearing its end. 
 
 I wish I could report it was worth the wait, but the paparazzi pictures of Pattinson and Stewart nuzzling are sexier than this. After Edward and Bella mutter their vows to each other in the woodsy garden of the Cullen mansion, the duo departs for a honeymoon on a Brazilian island. There is an ongoing debate over exactly how they’ll fare in the all-white marital bed. Bella’s discarded swain, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) the gentle werewolf, voices his concerns about their having sex before Bella has been turned into a vampire. “You’ll kill her!” he says to Edward, as if a vampire penis were a 300-horse-powered drill. But Bella demurs; the conversion process from human to vamp is agonizing. “I don’t want to spend my honeymoon writhing in pain.” 
 
 Ahem. She does end up bruised after giving up her maidenhood, and no wonder — Edward clutches the bedstead in pleasure and it crunches like Styrofoam (or a cheesy set) beneath his fingers. But everything we see is tame, firmly in the territory of artfully tangled sheets. Director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Gods and Monsters) delivers soap-opera-style sex — the kisses are dry, the caresses sweat-free, yet still, he cuts away discreetly like a blushing schoolgirl. 
 
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 Bella is game for more. “I think we did amazing,” she says in the morning. Fussy Edward valiantly vows not to put out again until Bella has been turned. They play chess instead, moving red and white pieces around the board instead of enjoying a piece of each other. He resolutely ignores how cute she looks in lingerie. In one hilarious bit, he eyes her lacy rump, then pulls the covers over it. Young people of the world: Sex is nothing like this! 
 
 The die is cast, though; their unplanned demon child is already growing within her, gestating at a rate so speedy, it might make a cat jealous. There are many things about Meyer’s fantasy universe that drive me crazy, but her constant sidestepping of accepted vampire lore comes close to topping the list. The most flagrant violation of standard vampire behavior is the revelation that they can impregnate a human (in Joss Whedon’s television series Angel, one vampire gets another vampire pregnant, another stretch, but at least it was supernatural all the way around). See, this is what happens when you don’t practice safe sex; even the undead can knock you up. 
 
 This is Meyer’s worst offense — her disturbingly Victorian attitudes about sex and love, which this movie falls modestly in lockstep with, even though it concludes years of cinematic foreplay. Twilight came out in 2008, but it feels like we’ve been waiting a decade for these two to get past first base. I know it’s too late in the game to get all hot and bothered about the basic premise. But there are so many scenes of people standing around doing nothing and posing ridiculously, like models in a commercial for high-end jeans, that I had time to reflect on both the petty (like how peculiar Bella’s gown is, ill-fitting spandex in the bodice, Priscilla of Boston lace panels in the back) and the perverse. This is the stuff of gothic novels, the heroine swayed by the terrible, beastly maleness of her lover, a sexual act that hovers on rape in its sense of terror. Bella relinquishes control, sexual pupil to Edward’s century-old rake, while he wakes up in the morning full of mopey self-loathing (“How badly are you hurt?”). Maybe Meyer never got over her own teenage Georgette Heyer phase. 
 
 There is also something extraordinarily deflating about realizing that you are sitting among a throng of blissful fans content with such a static enterprise. If it weren’t for the gifted Anna Kendrick as Bella’s best human friend (“I just thought it would bigger,” she says of the cake) and Bella’s dad Charlie (Billy Burke), the movies would feature nothing but unintentional humor. As Bella’s belly grows, the Cullen clan gathers around, plying her with cashmere throws and cups full of O Negative (this fetus has no interest in ice cream or pickles). But they’re helpless. What’s in there? “It’s just a little baby,” one of the indistinguishable girl Cullens says. “Possibly,” hisses one of the boy Cullens. Even doctor “dad” Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) doesn’t know what to do. The superhuman baby is sucking his mother dry — the already skinny Stewart looks like death’s head here. Let’s hope her skeletal frame owes something to CGI. Edward is in favor of a late-term abortion in order to save his lady love, but as usual she’s stubborn. No matter that a war is brewing between the Quileute “dogs” and the vamps over the undead unborn. She loves the baby. And as the birth approaches, in a bit of remarkable vampire technology, Edward is able to communicate with the fetus Cullen and learn this wonderful tidbit: “He loves you, Bella.” 
 
 There has been much speculation over how the birth sequence would be handled. Even die-hard Meyer fans admit to being freaked out by how bloody and weird it is on the page, with fangs replacing surgical instruments. On the screen, it is a rapidly cut sequence of ketchup and interior views of veins, less horrifying than bizarre, and like the sex, oddly anticlimactic. In the final installment, due next November, Bella will be a mother and a vampire, but since the Twilight movies are the most remote tale of love, sex and reproduction ever put to film, the chances that Breaking Dawn—Part 2 will be anything worth sinking your teeth into are as slim as Bella Swan. 
 
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 LIST: The Top 10 Movies Based on Kids’ Books ||||| It breaks my heart to tell you that "Breaking Dawn" is broken.The movie that's carved out of the first half of the last book of Stephenie Meyer 's vampires -in-love series, starring Kristen Stewart Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner , is weighted down by more than its title, to say nothing of the expectations. For the record, it's called "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1," as if 5 billion insanely attentive Twihards wouldn't be able to find it.Maybe the studio suits have begun to believe the franchise, like the classy Cullen clan, is immortal, that almost nothing can kill it. They'd better hope that last bit is true, because "Breaking Dawn" kinda sucks, in the metaphoric rather than the vampiric sense. The film doesn't have nearly the bite — ferocious or delicious — that any self-respecting vampire movie really should. It's as if all the life has drained away.Yes, there is the wedding of the century, and no, it wasn't Kim and what's-his-name's. With high school behind her, Bella (Stewart) can marry her stone cold hottie, Edward (Pattinson), finally putting an end to Jacob's (Lautner) werewolf dreams of winning her heart. The wedding is one of the best things about this installment — a slow tease building up to the big reveal — and not easy to do with any drama because, let's face it, anyone who has even a passing interest in "Twilight" or walks by a magazine rack, knows it's all about the wedding. (Again, not Kim's.)With Bill Condon directing and Bella's sister-in-law-to-be Alice ( Ashley Greene ) doing all the wedding planning, it is an exquisite, elegant, exceedingly tasteful affair. What is it about vampires that they always have such high-end style? Something in the blood? I ask, because if so, the Red Cross should siphon some of its stash, run ads in Architectural Digest and develop another revenue stream.But I digress. So the wedding is superb in its execution, the filmmakers allowing plenty of time to savor it. Still I'd really hoped for more that just a well-polished look from Condon. With his "Dreamgirls" and "Gods and Monsters" background, he seemed a perfect fit for the final chapters of the tale of this dream girl and her godless monster. Such a pity.The couple say their "I do's," a little till-death-do-us-part irony. And right about now is when the film'smeta-story starts kicking in in ways that are a little distracting, a little weird. If you've kept up with the glossy celebrity magazines since the first "Twilight" movie in 2008, you know that Stewart and Pattinson have been a couple on and off almost from the beginning. And if you believe the tabloids and if photos don't lie, and I surely do and they surely don't, Pattinson is the more smitten of the pair.So watching Edward watch Bella walk down that aisle, the adoration in his eyes, the relief when she says "yes," the kiss that seals their union — quite honestly it doesn't seem like acting per se (if it is, then it's one of his best performances). And I won't even go into the whole honeymoon night sequence, or the way the actors' on-screen "chemistry" is being marketed, or the mixed-messages it sends to girls about their first sexual experience.But that's not the film's real problem. What Meyer did so brilliantly in the book (or at least really, really well), and what Melissa Rosenberg's script fails to do, is to mine all the dramatic potential of the symbolic implications of immortality.The book gives over quite a few of its 756 pages to Bella's struggle with the high price of dying to live forever, especially for her parents, and Edward's guilt about it. And there is barely a mention of the provocative abortion debate — should the vampire-human hybrid created during the honeymoon be "removed" before it kills Bella?For conflict, we're left with Bella in a few moments of contemplation and consternation — which requires very little from Stewart, an actress capable of so much more. The rest of the tension building is left up to Jacob and his werewolf issues. He goes postal when the wedding invitation arrives, hackles raised, lots of growling, disappearing for days, so that's a real nail-biter…For those keeping score, "Breaking Dawn" is missing the interesting indie edge that director Catherine Hardwicke brought to the first film. It does not flat line as badly as the second, "New Moon," which would have died without the werewolves' bite. It loses the brief emotional uptick of No. 3, "Eclipse," which saw the cast blossom into actual actors. So in the "Twilight" pantheon, " Breaking Dawn Part 1 " is at best a draw. Hopefully they'll fix what's wrong before next year's finale, because I really can't take another broken heart. ||||| Dawn isn’t the only thing that gets broken in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part I,” the latest and best of the movies about a girl, her vampire and their impossible, ridiculously appealing — yes, I surrendered — love story. Marked by a canny mix of violence and chastity, the franchise has always had plenty of broken heads to go along with its pure thoughts, but here it also features a marital bed reduced to kindling after a rough night. If that doesn’t sound like the series that has kept millions of prepubescent viewers virtuously rapt, you’re right. But little Bella is all grown up now, and while Edward is still more zomboid than juicily predatory, this time not everything else on screen is dead too. 
 
 With only four books in Stephenie Meyer’s chart-busting series (as opposed to the seven Harry Potters), the people behind the “Twilight” movies can be forgiven for stretching out the screen experience for as long as possible. (“Breaking Dawn” 2 hits next November.) And, after all, so much does happen in this movie, which takes the arc of human experience — birth and death and everything in between — and works it up into a rich, sudsy lather. In the past, Bella (played with increasing confidence by Kristen Stewart) has been almost eclipsed by Edward (Robert Pattinson), his bloodsucking brood and their battles. Here, though, she returns as the emotional and psychological cornerstone in a series in which the center of gravity has shifted from frenzied action and reaction to love. 
 
 The movie opens shortly before Bella and Edward’s wedding at his family digs — a luxe affair decked in white and foreshadowed by a nightmare steeped in red — which reunites many of the principals, with the exception of Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who’s off sulking, having lost his claim on Bella. Poor wolf never stood a chance; vampires aren’t just hot (and sometimes scorching, as on the HBO show “True Blood”), they have, in recent years, also become the favorite go-to romantic male lead, the last, possibly sole defense against the nice-guy tide embodied by the Apatowesque freaks and geeks and their bromantic brethren. The vampire, in other words, is the only man (other than George Clooney) who can still sweep a woman off her feet — so what if he’s actually dead? 
 
 Being dead, in truth, gives the male vampire a great romantic advantage, because it allows him to engage in the kind of old-fashioned dash and derring-do — with one arm around the girl and the other smacking away foes — that might be laughed or scolded off the screen. (The age of the chivalrous superhero ended when Christopher Reeve hung up his Superman cape in 1987.) One of the complex pleasures of the “Twilight” movies is the absolute sincerity with which they’ve revived the unironic romantic male lead, an ideal that works (when the movies do, anyway) because it’s Bella who actively, even desperately, desires Edward. He’s her choice, not that of her parents or anyone else. 
 
 First came kissing, now comes marriage, a surprisingly rollicking honeymoon and, almost immediately, a horrendous pregnancy that the director Bill Condon makes so palpably disturbing that it might cause David Cronenberg, the master of body horror, to wince. Mr. Condon handles the little bit of action in “Breaking Dawn” capably, but it’s his work with (and sometimes around) the actors and his ability to translate ideas visually that lifts this movie above the rest. When Bella first appears, she enters wobbling in uncharacteristic towering heels, an image that instantly suggests her unsteadiness before her wedding, and, as she moves toward the altar, Mr. Condon further telegraphs her unease by filling the screen with red rose petals that turn into a sanguineous hallucination. 
 
 Crucially and as important, Mr. Condon, whose earlier films include “Dreamgirls” and “Gods and Monsters,” can also offer up, and without a suggestion of filmmaker embarrassment, the sight of Mr. Lautner ripping off his shirt. As Jacob, Edward’s long-suffering, oft-rejected rival for Bella’s affection, Mr. Lautner has plenty of reasons to strip angry: he can turn into a wolf, for starters, and Jacob’s musculature has long been one of the most special of the movies’ effects. That’s reason enough for Mr. Condon to get the character’s shirt off, as is the unavoidable truth that Mr. Lautner, whose pumped physique and flat affect bring to mind one of those friendly pizza delivery boys in a pornographic movie, remains a dish best served with as few words and clothes as possible. 
 
 Though he smolders well enough (if no longer sparkles), Mr. Pattinson is scarcely any better than his brother in beefcake. If that doesn’t matter, it’s because Mr. Pattinson’s heaviest lifting is over. His character is already well sketched in, and now all that remains is for the actor to play the part of the passionate, potentially dangerous vampire husband, which he — or, rather, his smart director — conveys with the startling image of Edward’s hands clenching the honeymoon bed until it explodes under his powerful touch. This image of sexual rough play is further capped the next morning by bruises now tattooing Bella’s body, branding that — along with her smiles (a private reverie reminiscent of Diane Lane’s postcoital raptures in “Unfaithful”) — shifts the story into another world. 
 
 Mr. Condon works in that world fluidly, gilding it with a necessary sense of humor — Bella and Edward’s white honeymoon bed glows as portentously as an altar for a sacrificial virgin — and imbuing it with a love and a gift for melodrama. He slathers on the music (“melodrama” comes from song or music drama), lets Ms. Stewart rock and the emotions roil. He resurrects the awkward teenage yearning that enlivened the first “Twilight” movie, but also transforms that initial, crude hunger into something deeper. Mostly, he brings Bella toward her happily-ever-after by giving this movie over to her, her dreams and her desires, as in a cosmic montage sequence worthy of “The Tree of Life,” but, you know, shorter. Edward may finally change Bella, but it’s Mr. Condon who resurrects her. 
 
 “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Vampire and werewolf violence and strong intimations of rough sex. 
 
 THE TWILIGHT SAGA 
 
 Breaking Dawn — Part 1 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Directed by Bill Condon; written by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel “Breaking Dawn,” by Stephenie Meyer; director of photography, Guillermo Navarro; edited by Virginia Katz; music by Carter Burwell; production design by Richard Sherman; costumes by Michael Wilkinson; visual effects by John Bruno; produced by Wyck Godfrey, Karen Rosenfelt and Ms. Meyer; released by Summit Entertainment. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Kristen Stewart (Bella Swan), Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen), Taylor Lautner (Jacob Black), Billy Burke (Charlie Swan), Peter Facinelli (Dr. Carlisle Cullen), Elizabeth Reaser (Esme Cullen), Kellan Lutz (Emmett Cullen), Nikki Reed (Rosalie Hale), Jackson Rathbone (Jasper Hale), Ashley Greene (Alice Cullen), Michael Sheen (Aro), Anna Kendrick (Jessica), Sarah Clarke (Renee), Christian Camargo (Eleazar Denali), Gil Birmingham (Billy), Julia Jones (Leah), Booboo Stewart (Seth), Mia Maestro (Carmen Denali), Casey Labow (Kate Denali), Maggie Grace (Irina Denali) and Myanna Buring (Tanya Denali).
– 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.”