Okay, I had so many issues with this movie I cannot even begin. Luckily, this covers most of them. The line report, movie notes, and me freaking out, below the cuts!

Please note: in the interest of thoroughness, this post is epically long. My bad.

The line was smaller than last year (because we went to a smaller theatre), and we stood calmly in the back-and-forth of velvet ropes. For an hour and a half. (Hint: after an hour and a half, no line is calm.)

At 11:55, the theatre door opened and people streamed out. One of them was carrying a life-size Jacob cutout, which she had to hold over her head as she stepped over the ropes to the exit, because people kept reaching out to touch it. She totally beaned at least four people on her way out. When someone asked, politely, “Where did you get that?” she grinned and smarmed, “Early screening. Invitation only,” and swanned down the escalator.

At the realization that the theatre had scheduled an advance screening that didn’t let out until five minutes before their intended screening, the volume level rose sharply.

When, ten minutes later, the theatre doors opened again, there was a stampede.

Women leapt over the velvet ropes, elbowing one another out of the way. Screams erupted as people got smacked. Sharp shouts of “Hey! HEY!” came from people near the front of the line, who were trying not to get trampled by the wave of people. Someone tripped, and was tripped over. Someone screamed, “Watch my poster!”

It was over in maybe twenty seconds, but holy shit, you guys, those fans are NOT KIDDING.

And then it was time for the movie.

We begin with Bella having a dream about being older and not as hot as Edward. Please note that even in the dream, Edward still loves her very much; she just wakes up screaming because she’s going to get old and lose her looks. Your heroine, ladies and gentlemen!

Then her dad, Charlie, appears in the doorway and is like, “Happy birthday!” Bella grumps, “I thought we said no presents.” Charlie holds out a camera, looking like he regrets ever agreeing to have a child.

Bella’s reply: “Wow, this is actually really great.” ACTUALLY really great. As opposed to all the other shitty stuff he’s gotten her, like the bedroom furnishings and a truck so she wouldn’t be dependent on him for transportation. Man, it’s really sad she never gets eaten, you know?

Then she goes to school and says hello to the humans briefly before her boyfriend shows up. The human teens are hilarious for their two seconds, and even more so because when Edward shows up they all literally roll their eyes and leave, because they know this couple is totally useless. Then Edward allows Bella to speak with Jacob (!), and she asks when he’s going to join the main high school with the “palefaces” (!!). Score another point for the humans!

[...you guys.]

Also, Edward and Bella have a relationship where they only ever talk about their relationship, which is staggeringly boring just to be in, much less to have to WATCH, so they sit in the back of English class and he talks about how much he wishes he could commit suicide, and she threatens him that if he ever does that she’ll kill herself, too, and I JUST WANT A MOVIE ABOUT THE HUMAN TEENS, OKAY? I want them all to team up with Charlie and solve cute mysteries. That is all I want.

But no! Instead we get a birthday party thrown by the Cullens (which Bella HATES because it makes her feel OLD and UNATTRACTIVE and OLD), and while opening one of her presents she gets a paper cut, and Jasper is overwhelmed with her blood and tries to eat her.

Sadly, he does not succeed, and Edward realizes, like a puppy finding a toad in a basket of towels, that something’s not right, and he wants to protect Bella forever.

So he dumps her and leaves town. Your hero, ladies and gents!

Bella spends the next thirty minutes of the movie having epic sulks and screaming nightmares. (Never have I seen a character so desperately in need of a hobby. Plus, I guess it’s lucky that Forks doesn’t have a high crime rate, so the Chief of Police can be sleep-deprived for months without anything bad happening.) The movie desperately tries to draw a Romeo and Juliet parallel, forgetting that the reason Juliet’s suffering is bearable is because she drops dead from poison a few minutes into her hissy. Sadly, no one poisons Bella.

When her dad suggests she gets help (a very caring parental suggestion for someone clearly in the midst of depression), it’s painted as Dads Totally Do Not Understand How Love Works, and Dad No Longer Wants What is Best For Me, Like Those Musical Montages of Me Staring Out the Window as the Camera Spins, Which are Super Hip and Therefore Therapeutic.

In an attempt to fool her father, she goes to the movies with Jessica, who awesomely points out that Bella is a) no fun and B) totally selfish and ungrateful. Then Bella realizes that when she accepts rides from strange bikers, she sees a floating vision of her hot boyfriend, and is stoked. Jessica is mortified, because Jessica has the sense God gave a hamster.

Bella decides to take advantage of her friend Jacob by pretending she likes him a lot so he will fix a motorcycle for her so she can try to crash it and, in the moment before injury, see a glimpse of her boyfriend again.

Girl, GET A HOBBY. Knitting is nice! Everyone likes knitting! Hell, even fixing your own fucking deathcycle is a hobby, right?

Whatever. There’s a montage of him fixing bikes and her throwing pizza slices at him (no, seriously, she throws pizza at him and he catches it, because that’s what teenagers do when they hang out). Then they take the bikes out, and she crashes at two miles an hour, and he runs to save her and rips his shirt off to stop her head from bleeding. (First aid is different in the Pacific Northwest, I guess.) Bella is stunned by his beauty (I am not making this up), and from this glimpse of his chest she decides she Likes Him, Too.

Brief pause: How on earth are we supposed to be rooting for the most ungrateful, selfish, boring, shallow heroine in all of literature, exactly?

What follows is a chastefest of interrupted kisses and increasingly disturbing male posturing, because Jacob is a WOLF, a wild sexual WOLF, don’t you SEE? So on one side is Edward the Hovering Dad, who appears whenever Bella’s thinking of doing something dangerous, so he can scold her for not keeping that promise she never made while he was breaking up with her. On the other side is Jacob, whose werewolf aggression manifests in him getting possessive over her like she’s a pig’s ear.

Best scene about this: Mike asks Bella on a date (he offers to take her to “Love Spelled Backwards is Love,” which is by far the best line in the movie). She does that thing where she includes everyone (ouch), and then only Jacob and Mike and Bella actually show. Ouch. Also, smart of those other people to stay away, because seriously, I would not want to hang around Bella either. Mike gets sick from the violence and goes to throw up. He is mercilessly mocked by Jacob and Bella for not being strong enough to handle gore. While Mike is gone, Jacob tells Bella he likes her that way. When she gently declines, he starts in with the shit where he’s never going to stop trying, no matter what, and because Bella has all the deductive power of a snow pea, she somehow thinks this is comforting and not probably cause for a restraining order.

When Mike comes out of the bathroom, Jacob is pissed he interrupted Jacob’s moves on Bella and tries to start a fight. Mike is like, “I just threw up, this makes no sense, see you later, I SAID GOOD DAY SIR,” and gets the fuck out of there, because he realizes that even if these people are the heroes of their own dramas, they are a bunch of immature assholes who should be avoided. TEAM MIKE.

[Mike's facial expression is all our facial expressions!]

After this it all becomes one appalling blur, with the exception of the scene I keep talking about where Victoria, on the hunt for Bella, is chased by the werewolves. The thing is, at the time, it was so fucking glorious not to have any dialogue, and to have decent music and cinematography, that I felt like it was an Amazing Movie Moment. It is, in fact, not. It is the equivalent of crawling through mud for two hours, and then finding an agate. Worth almost nothing on the scale of real gems, but much nicer than mud!

Bella decides to be a werewolf girlfriend with the same ego-swallowing gusto she decided to be a vampire girlfriend, even after she meets Emily, the girlfriend of the pack leader (and not a werewolf because ladies stay at home and cook FOR werewolves instead, because Stephenie Meyer is just a walking psychological quagmire). Emily has a slashed-up face from that time she made her boyfriend angry and he turned into a werewolf and SLASHED HER FACE. Jacob explains this to Bella and wraps up with, “I couldn’t take it if that happened,” because his guilt would CLEARLY be the worst thing about SLASHING UP HIS GIRLFRIEND’S FACE, STEPHENIE MEYER, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Alice finally shows up to take Bella to find Edward, because Alice had a vision of Bella falling off a cliff, which she did, and maybe dying, which she almost did in a nice perfume-ad way before Jacob saved her, and Alice wanted to see if it was true.

It’s not true! Alice pretends to be relieved. Then she realizes that Edward read her mind, and thinks Bella is dead, and they have to get to Italy before he kills himself, which apparently he won’t do for several days, since they have time to take a plane trip (on VIRGIN AIRLINES AHAHAHAHAH oh my god) to Italy and steal a car and drive to this little village in the middle of nowhere where apparently the world’s most powerful vampires have decided to settle forever, because escape routes are for dorks.

Naturally, Bella saves Edward from stepping out into the sun and possibly being seen by humans thus requiring his ritual slaughter by the enforcers of the powerful vampires who will kill him if they find out he has stepped into the sun as an appeal to their previous refusal to kill him (Edward likes complicated plans). Then she cries into his glittery, mildly hairy chest, explaining her terror when she thought he might be dead. “I can’t think,” she wheedles earnestly, and then drops off into a silence so significant that she might as well be saying, “…ever.” CORRECT.

Then they all go down and talk to the people who signed on for this movie because it meant a free trip to Italy. There’s a brief fight between Edward and the enforcer vampire, which is at least better moviemaking than the escalators and fast-forward button used in Twilight, because this is filmed in brief glimpses of people and then a smoky effect as if they are too fast for the eye. But also in Twilight Alice got to rip the bad guy’s head off, and in this one she’s subdued in two seconds and never even tries to struggle free, so, way to be a scary vampire, anyone but Edward and that one other guy!

(Also, to make up for all the Jacob chest, they pull Edward’s pants down.

…whyyyyy, Michael Sheen, whyyyyy.]

Whatever. Alice promises that Bella will end up a vampire, and shares her vision of them running through the forest in Hansel and Gretel costumes, and because Bella and Edward’s love is So True that they get to go home with the promise she will be turned shortly.

[Actual scene from the movie. They run in slow motion. Every single person in the theatre laughed.]

All the Cullens agree, and then everything will be fine forever, except that Jacob still loves her, and THIS ISN’T OVER, for some reason! PS, Edward asks Bella to marry him THE END.

(Literally. He asks the question, and it’s a smash-cut to oblivion.)

[Mmm, feminism.]

The good news is this: even some of the die-hard fans were cracking up by the end, because this movie is just so ridiculous that it goes past camp and really becomes some kind of horrible muddy mess you just have to make your way through as pale faces float up around you to taunt you and try to drag you into the suffocating dark like you’re Frodo or something.

The bad news is this: This movie is even worse than the first one. That movie was miles better than the book. I can only imagine how antifeminist this book must be. The movie is bad enough, since we spend the movie watching a young woman construct her identity ENTIRELY around the desire of men to possess and control her; if the one she likes isn’t available, she’s more than happy to give in to the next one who’s aggressive enough to follow her around, even if he is the kind of guy who will RIP UP YOUR FACE if you ever make him mad, and the young woman thinks this is a VIABLE RELATIONSHIP, OH MY GOD.

And this is not the story of one girl who constructs her identity this way, offering some insight or character development or gentle critique of this mindset; this capitulation to men is the rubric by which the other female characters are judged. All the female vampires have boyfriends or husbands (even Victoria, who seeks revenge for the death of her boyfriend); Bella feels kinship with Emily because Emily is in a relationship with a werewolf (which, at that millisecond in time, Bella wants also). By contrast, Jessica seems to have broken up with Mike, since Mike asks Bella out, and it’s Jessica and her discussion of zombie movies and Bella’s mental state that is supposed to be shallow and unappealing.

I hear repeatedly that it’s just a story; that people who read it know the difference between fantasy and reality, that this is just a fad. And it could be! Many of these teens could grow out of the idea of picking teams in a book about a girl, and never even having Team Bella as an option. Many of these older fans might just be enjoying the books for their camp value.

However, last year in the line, I did interviews, where I handed out a list of ten things and asked for which ones happened in the books. Seven or eight out of ten got circled. Then I pointed out that the list was ten warning signs that your partner is becoming abusive or controlling, and asked what they thought of Edward’s behavior in this new light.

Responses included, “I wish a guy loved me enough to treat me that way,” and, “But Bella needed it.”

This year I was behind a group of girls who briefly discussed Team Edward vs. Team Jacob. Each one pointed out that the other person’s champion was possessive and controlling/bossy. “Well, but she let him,” was the final word, on each side.

Sure, it’s just a story, but I worry. It’s hard to deny that if you show a message enough, to an audience wide enough, there’s some inevitable internalization. And the Twilight books normalize and lionize the total sublimation of a woman’s identity, which is just not a message the world needs, does it, STEPHENIE MEYER, OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?