Director Bill Condon couldn’t be in Hall H for the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II panel, but he sent a taped message that turned the shriek-prone crowd ecstatic: “Instead of showing you a couple scenes from the movie,†he said, “we’re just going to show you the first seven minutes.†And then they did. And then Elisabeth Reaser turned to Kristen Stewart and enthused, “I didn’t think we could pull off you eating a mountain lion!â€
Yeah, that happened. After the muted first installment of the Twilight franchise ender, the first seven minutes of Breaking Dawn Part II promise something deliriously — and deliciously — over the top.
So what goes down? Well, Kristen Stewart’s Bella finally opens those newly reddened vampire eyes, and she’s now more attentive to everything: the fibers in the carpet on the floor, the small details in the wallpaper of the Cullens’ sleek forest home, and the sounds in the forest. But before she gets to see her brand-new half-vamp baby, Robert Pattinson’s Edward comes to her, and tells her they have to hunt.
This! This hunt! How to describe it? Okay, well, imagine Kristen Stewart with a supermodel blowout and an incongruous midnight-blue dress, her eyes alive and her makeup on point, ferociously crawling and stomping on giant rocks in the forest like she’s just stalked off the catwalk from George Michael’s music video for “Too Funky.†Everybody is just going for it, Condon’s roving camera included.
Blood-lusty Bella initially sets her sights on an innocent deer, but her vamp senses soon pick up on the scent of blood from a human mountain climber thousands of feet away (and thousands of feet in the air). She immediately, like, jump-run-leaps up the mountain to get at the dude until Edward talks her down; still plenty hungry, she senses that a mountain lion is about to leap at that deer from before, and she zooms down, jumps straight at the lion, sinks her freaking teeth into it in mid-air, and then crashes to the ground while still going munchy-munchy. What? That. That’s what.
If only every Twilight installment had opened in such a campy, gonzo way … but better late than never, right?