Last night was the release of Eclipse, the third movie in the Twilight franchise. Theaters were packed; Team Edward/Jacob loyalties ran high; anticipatory squeals filled the air.

The movie that unfolded wasn’t worth any of it.

This has gone beyond cinematic “worth” in the context of inscrutable teen tastes, or a shift in the zeitgeist, or any of the other trends that set their intended audience alight while mystifying everyone outside their demographic. This is about a two-hour movie that has to pull its bookend voiceover into the film to explain plot points it never shows, as the camera pans over a lengthy establishing shot of a forest.

…More than once.

The trend is distinct. Twilight will never be mistaken for a classic (it’s a decent teen flick and a terrible vampire movie), but for all its flaws it’s actually a movie; it has a cinematic vocabulary and a story with a beginning, middle, and end. New Moon was less coherent (though mercifully less blue), more a collection of filmed scenes from the book than a movie in its own right, and it killed time between halfhearted dialogue and CGI fight scenes by blasting its soundtrack as loudly as possible. But Eclipse, which has arguably the most movie-friendly source material of all four books, somehow manages to be the least cohesive, most awkwardly-assembled installment yet.

Why the decline?

First, to better understand the downward slide this franchise has taken, know that a character who has been speaking a regionless accent for two and a half films has a flashback to his time in the Confederate army, and carries the Texas drawl forward with him for the rest of the movie. This is the kind of decision which several people have to sign off on. It is the kind of decision which requires on-set maintenance. Eclipse is the kind of movie in which this decision makes it to the final cut.

With that general quality control in mind, let’s look at some likely factors for the slide.

The first and foremost reasoning is that truly spectacular adaptations of bad literature are rare, and so the movies can only be expected to be as good as the source material. That actually gets the movies a pass on nearly everything (the vacuous and off-putting Bella from the films still somehow manages to top the version in the books). This helps explain why Twilight worked where it did, since it had the initial tension between its romantic leads. It also explains a lot of the problems with New Moon; when your primary romantic lead drops off the scene for 400 pages and your secondary lead had less than a dozen lines in the last movie, good luck carrying that narrative tension. (Also, here is a vampire bureaucracy. You’re welcome.)

However, of all four movies, Eclipse is working with something closest to a real plot: the vengeful Victoria creates an army of newborn vampires (better, stronger, faster than they were before!) to pick off the Cullens; the overseeing Volturi are forced to get involved, which puts human Bella in danger; the werewolf pack and the Cullens face off; and Jacob and Edward both make their claims on Bella’s heart as the final battle barrels down on them.

And yet, with all this cross-antagonism and potential intrigue, the movie flounders as soon as Edward and Bella appear onscreen, and makes little attempt to carry any further tension. (There are several lengthy scenes of characters talking about how they will eventually have to make a decision. Adventure!)

Eclipse does have its almost-accidental moment of real fun, when a grinning Jasper leads a werewolf training session on how to beat the crap out of a vampire, and uses various family members as crash test dummies to demonstrate techniques. Like Twilight’s vampire baseball, or New Moon’s werewolf pursuit of Victoria, the scene transcends the plodding plot and becomes, for a moment, a movie about the thrill of being supernatural. (And, like the scenes in its predecessors, that moment does not last long.)

Those oddly-synchronous moments aside, the disparate list of directors who have helmed these outings are part of the quality problem. Even in the Harry Potter films, which have each made an attempt to be a standalone and engaging piece of cinema, the final product varies wildly by director, and that was with a list of directors who were picked with apparent deliberation, after the scope of the phenomenon was known.

Catherine Hardwicke probably remains the best choice that could have been made for Twilight. Having already made a claustrophobic teen movie or two, she knew her material, and at the time of filming the book had not quite caught fire; everyone involved was ostensibly making a cult movie based on a YA book. (We all know how that turned out.) Chris Weitz, director of the floptacular Golden Compass, was reportedly brought in at the last minute after Hardwicke and Summit couldn’t agree on a production schedule for New Moon, which might help explain the slapdash effects. But David Slade is the man behind the intense 30 Days of Night and the even more intense Hard Candy; with that resume it seems bizarre that we ended up with a movie as milquetoast as Eclipse.

But the most likely answer to the series’ decline, and a sad truth in any case, is that it no longer matters to anyone involved how bad the movies are. The core audience is so wide and so devoted that questions of quality simply don’t apply. If you are seeing a Twilight movie in all sincerity, then you want to see a list of your favorite scenes brought to life on the screen, and the franchise’s only goal now is to provide them. Those who come looking for craftsmanship, or even coherence, will starve.

The good news is that if you are seeing a Twilight movie to mock it, you’ll feast every time.

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com]

And the Eclipse postmortem begins! First up: Ten Things You Should Know About Eclipse, at Fantasy Magazine. This information might just save your life. (Or, two hours. Whichever.)

4. Howard Shore did the music.
You’ll know because whenever Bella and Edward make out, it sounds like every pervert in the Shire is creeping up on them.

His hand looks like a questing, half-hidden octopus, doesn’t it? (Go ahead, unsee it. I dare you.)

I have an article forthcoming at Tor.com about the franchise in general and the trend in cinematic quality (hint: yeeeeesh), and last up will be the line report and blow-by-blow, because seriously, you guys? YIKES.

Writing news! My story “Take Four” is in issue 9 of Kaleidotrope, alongside awesome people like Jason Heller and Rachel Swirsky. You can check out the full TOC and purchase info here.

Quick excerpt:

Marissa’s walkie-talkie hissed to life. “They know the gate’s sealed. Watch for them.”
The city was more than two miles across, but mobs always moved faster than you thought they would, and Greg barely had time to order the second-unit to film the rising dust before the townspeople burst out of the main square in the center of the city and barreled towards the gate.

Now, back to work. There’s a lot to do today before I hit the line for Eclipse. (More about this later…if I make it that long.)

Last night, while reviewing what I’ve been working on in handy graphic form (which I will be doing again, because it’s fun and prevents me from actually working), Inception was the last square.

Up at Tor.com today, I talk about what we know about Inception, and what Inception means.

Hint: it means that smart sci-fi movies are thin on the ground these days, and a movie pitched as cerebral sci-fi is an event in and of itself. (Seriously, the only thing emphasized in the trailer is dreams/ideas/the mind, and also how all these people look really great in nice clothes.) This strategy wouldn’t have worked on a movie like, say, Moon, which was one of last year’s thinkiest sci-fi movies, but too indie for its own good somehow, and it ended up coming out in about eight theatres and disappearing off the face of the earth, except for one DVD copy that I put in a time capsule to save for later.

Obviously there’s no worries about that here, because Nolan made Batman cool again, which means he can basically do what he wants, forever. However, I am really hoping that this movie does not happen to suck. A lot of movies by good directors happen to suck, but when Channing Tatum gets tapped for the lead in a dimensional-sci-fi-action-romance that got suddenly greenlit because it’s vaguely like Avatar, I bet a lot of good scripts are floating around that could really benefit from some box-office proof that smart sells.

I’m just saying, in a world where Ridley Scott is remaking his own Alien franchise, Spider-Man is getting a reboot THREE YEARS after the last one came out, and Avatar can win Golden Globes*, we could really use a win, here.

NO PRESSURE, INCEPTION.

* To be fair, many undeserving people have won Golden Globes.

This week, Christopher Nolan and company released 14 new stills from his sci-fi thriller Inception.

These photos might require a spoiler warning, but honestly, it’s not as if we’d know. Nolan has been tight-lipped about the project from the beginning. For months after its announcement, he would say only it was set “within the architecture of the mind.” Early promotional material was equally vague.

More recently, a set of character posters have given us a lineup straight out of a film-noir caper (with titles like Point Man, Shade, Forger, and Mark), and theatrical trailers have inevitably begun to give hints as to the plot.

We now know for sure that Inception is about this guy, and there are dreams, and a girl who is maybe dreaming or not, and you can take ideas out or put them in, and lobbies, and guys wearing suits well, and Marion Cotillard has expressive eyes, and also there are lots of hallways, and people sitting looking at each other, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt signed up for a lot of wire work, and some other stuff happens.

The thing is, in a movie landscape that’s been slowly starved of anything mildly cerebral, this movie is in a pretty precarious spot. It has a power director behind it, and an A-list cast, and what we’ve seen of the effects has been well-done and unexpected. However, part of the reason the plot is being kept vague is because Nolan has pitched this from the beginning as a cerebral film (literally and figuratively), and in the wake of grinding comic-book franchises, sequels to sequels, 80s-toy adaptations, and 80s-monster reboots, Hollywood is holding its breath.

It’s up to Inception to prove that there’s still room in the multiplex for smart sci-fi.

Of course, this is not a particularly fair position for this movie to be in. Nolan is a solid director with a good track record, but many a director with a good track record makes the occasional bomb (lookin’ at you, Ridley Scott), and without a strong trend of downward spiral (…Ridley), if a movie doesn’t do well, then it’s technically just a data point on a larger graph with invisible juggernauts like Eclipse and Toy Story 3 affecting results.

However, in a Hollywood with a memory so short it’s already rebooting a franchise that had its last installment three years ago, even one underperforming movie is enough to put the red light on half a dozen other concepts. (That cerebral-sci-fi standby Michael Gondry is directing this summer’s Green Hornet movie speaks volumes about what the current movie market will support.)

And even if the movie does well, there are no guarantees that much will come of it. I’m not sure how many smart spec scripts have been stamped “Greenlit, Pending Inception’s First-Weekend Numbers.” But this is the industry that has declared, based on Jonah Hex’s opening box-office and her release from Transformers, that Megan Fox’s career is already over, and her franchise has only been around for three years. If Inception rakes it in opening weekend, six people in LA will ask for something just like it, and six smart-spec scripts will turn their conceptual little faces to the sun and bloom. (Also an angel will get its wings. Also there are dreams with restaurants.)

Christopher Nolan’s box-office record is that of a director who knows how to make a smart, noirish action flick that occasionally goes gangbusters at the box office. Let’s hope this is one of those times.

(A recent trailer for Inception is below. Look, hallways!)

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com.]