Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Reviews
Top CriticThis penultimate "Twilight" film is the best in the series so far. It's languorous, romantic, moody, and, in the end, horrifying.
Color us stoked that a Twilight movie even strays into evil-fetus territory.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The last twenty minutes of Breaking Dawn are so harrowing that it's possible to forget that most of the acting is soap-operatic (the guy who plays Carlisle is aging to look like Liberace) and the dialogue from hunger.
Melodrama reigns in this supernatural soap opera, even though author Stephanie Meyer's tale takes a decided turn toward the weird and violent.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is a well-made film, though sometimes unintentionally funny.
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| Original Score: 2.0/5
There are a few reasons The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1 is probably the best of the Twilight films.
For those of us who are not Twilight fanatics, or even fans, or could not care somewhat less than less, the arrival of Part 1 is not cause for trumpets blaring. But I would imagine that even those who line up for this film will be somewhat let down.
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| Original Score: C-
By any normal standard, this is a terrible movie, with stilted dialogue and leaden pacing -- every 15 minutes or so, the action stops for a musical montage involving slow-motion handsomeness. But the Twilight saga stopped being normal a long time ago.
Here's hoping Breaking Dawn Part Two gives us more of what Part One provided in the final 30 minutes than what it forced viewers to endure to get there.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
[It] was supposed to be climactic. Instead, it's the most jumbled and tonally confused movie yet.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What remains is the total conviction that the ludicrous scenes are dead serious and fiercely meaningful. The result is not quite a laugh a minute, but close.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Romanticizing an intimate relationship that leaves bruises and scars is a particularly terrible idea in a film aimed at girls. Talking about this is tiresome, but then so is putting it in the movie.
If you insist on seeing the entire, seemingly never-ending 117 minutes, though, you're going to spend at least 87 of those minutes bored out of your mind.
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| Original Score: C+
The sexless, bloodless, padded and plodding Breaking Dawn, Part 1 is the worst Twilight movie to date.
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| Original Score: 1/4
The Twilight Saga hasn't matured along with its heroine. In fact, the latest movie regresses a bit, delivering more filler, less feeling and crummier CGI than last year's Eclipse.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Breaking Dawn - Part 1 and the upcoming Part 2 were both directed by Dreamgirls' Bill Condon, who keeps the lunacy moving apace.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Will Condon's movie convert agnostics to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight cult?
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| Original Score: 3/4
It breaks my heart to tell you that "Breaking Dawn" is broken.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The good news? Now that all of the tedious exposition has been gotten, glacially, out of the way, "Part II" will probably be terrific.
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| Original Score: 2/4
To my taste, savvy Hollywood veteran Bill Condon debuts as director of the two-part Twilight conclusion in satisfying fashion, delivering a voluptuous if often inert spectacle that splits the difference between high camp and decadent romance.
Breaking Dawn - Part 1 as a whole feels stretched-out, as if the filmmakers realized belatedly that there wasn't enough material in the book to sustain two movies. (There isn't).
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| Original Score: 2/4
Condon delivers the most authoritatively directed Twilight film so far, which only brings into sharp relief how tonally incoherent its story is.
This is Meyer's worst offense -- her disturbingly Victorian attitudes about sex and love, which this particular movie falls modestly in lockstep with, even though it concludes years of cinematic foreplay.
To his credit, Condon takes this risible material as seriously as possible and makes the proceedings as stylish and creepy as he can.
One is also grateful for the film's finale... which is genuinely brilliant. There, I said it.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Yes, I know, Twilight fans love The Twilight Saga. But they (you?) deserve something better to love.
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| Original Score: C-
The dialogue is, of course, ridiculous and the acting ranges from stiff to mopey. But moments that should be pulsating with tension are usually hilarious because the special effects are still just so distractingly cheesy.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
The absurdity quotient of the movie begins high and rapidly escalates to bedlam.
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| Original Score: 2/4
As a stand-alone movie it's a mixed bag. But it progresses the story of beloved characters with a reverence for the source material that will doubtlessly please Twi-hards, ushering in a finale that promises to be darker still.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The latest and best of the movies about a girl, her vampire and their impossible, ridiculously appealing - yes, I surrendered - love story.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Whenever certain actors take the lead and set the pace of the dialogue, time itself begins to crawl backward and the breaking dawn begins to feel like yesterday's breaking dawn, or last Tuesday's.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
This one draws you close and keeps you there - and, for those of us who haven't read Stephenie Meyer's novel, delivers some surprising turns of plot.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Though director Bill Condon is new to the series, both he and returning screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg have an excellent grasp of their audience's desires, and are determined to meet them in good faith.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Pattinson again stands around looking pale and soulful, while Lautner gets to act more, which is maybe not such a good thing.
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| Original Score: 1.5/5
Kristen Stewart is really pretty good here, although like almost all actresses she believes pregnant women rub their baby bumps unceasingly.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Breaking Dawn'' is the series in its fullest Victorian flower. But with Bill Condon directing, the pacing is all wrong. It's "Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies.''
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| Original Score: 2/4
The series is finding momentum as it nears its finale.
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| Original Score: 3/4
All the more disappointing, then, that a story so pregnant with dramatic possibilities should wind up feeling like such an unconsummated opportunity.
An eventful but bloodless first half of the smash series' finale.
