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]

This weekend I saw Repo Men so I could review it for Tor.com.

I know there had been some internet chatter about how this film stole its premise from Repo! The Genetic Opera. Since futuristic body-as-commodity stories are not singular, I didn’t worry about it. (Plus, if you ask me, someone is welcome to make a movie off Repo!s premise, since it would be nice to see a movie with that concept that didn’t completely suck, but that’s a different argument.)

Anyway, long story short, it doesn’t steal much from Repo!. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and about a dozen other sci-fi films, however, should probably be looking askance at Repo Men.

I tried to give a pretty spoiler-free review, not that you can spoil a movie like this anyway. So, LJ-cut for those of you who are desperate to let this cinematic gem unfold before you unspoiled. (None of that sentence will ever happen.)

So, aside from the bad plot and the awful dialogue and the hamfisted voiceover and the hyperviolent fight scenes and the frenetic editing, this movie pulls a Total Recall and has the happy ending be all a dream in Jude Law’s head. In fact, the movie’s entire last third has happened entirely in Jude Law’s head! Surprise! How will you ever know what’s real now, huh? BLEW YOUR MIND, DIDN’T I?

When this happens to you in the theatre, it’s just the worst. It’s especially the worst because the only foreshadowing is that when Forest Whitaker slams Jude Law in the head with the enormous cargo-lifting-hook he’s using and we hear the standard Dolby Surround Squelch, I said out loud, “Now he’s dead and the rest of the movie is a dream.”

Here’s the thing: despite seeing about 320,398 movies in my lifetime, I’m still not good at picking the murderer in a mystery. I’m better than I used to be, but mostly I’m like, “I love this dialogue!” and “Look at those curtains!” and “This shot of the empty shed is ineffective” and when they reveal the killer I’m like, “…Oh man, there was a murder!” I am not hard to fool, is what I’m saying.

However, this movie is such a horrible, badly-broadcast, suspense-free mess that it would have been obvious to a petri dish of bacteria that he was now dead and the rest of the movie was a dream. Two people GOT UP AND LEFT after that moment, because they clearly knew that the main character had died and didn’t want to sit through a 40-minute dream sequence.

Also, the happy ending was a dream and the world is unchanged – fine, whatever, I prefer that in a movie like this, anyway. However, the dreamy happy ending we sit through is Jude Law saying “We’ll go to Headquarters and erase the database and free EVERYONE!”, getting there and realizing that will be difficult, and then deciding to just save himself and his girlfriend. YOUR HERO, LADIES AND GENTS. I laughed out loud, and I’m not sorry.

There’s a moment early in Repo Men in which Jude Law’s Remy, an artificial-organ retrieval operative, is reclaiming the liver of a past-due gentlemen whom Remy has tasered to subdue. In the middle of Remy’s legally-mandated questionnaire about whether the man would like to have an ambulance present, the man’s date attacks Remy. “There’s no need for violence, miss,” assures Remy, and promptly tasers her, too.

Most of Repo Men feels like this. I don’t mean stale one-liners inserted into a premise that devolves into a by-the-book dystopia. I mean, it feels like being tasered.

Theoretically, Repo Men should be a movie for our time because it focuses on the punitive bait-and-switch of privatized healthcare, and the seemingly inhuman ability of corporate employees to enact greed cycles without thought to the human cost—two timely concepts that absolutely deserve screen time, especially tackled metaphorically in a sci-fi setting.

Practically, though, Repo Men is a movie for our time because it’s a hyper-violent, poorly-scripted, nominally sci-fi clunker that fails to deliver on its premise.

And the premise itself isn’t bad. In fact, despite a too-jokey voiceover, the film’s opening fifteen minutes set the stage for a dark comedy that might have pulled off the intended criticism of corporate culture and the many villainies of recession. Repo men wear the short-sleeved dress shirts of a third-tier bank teller, and their corporate headquarters features Disneyfied men-in-lung-suits for kids to play with. Law himself is suitably engaging as a man who’s not only efficient at his job, but might in fact love what he does. Law has always been much better at arch, creepy character parts than as a leading man, and for these fifteen minutes the role suits him. Forest Whitaker is equally strong; if the director had the courage to make his leads interesting rather than likable, this might have turned out to be a satire worth seeing. (Liev Schreiber, a bright spot as the smarmy corporate honcho, goes through the whole movie pretending this is the movie he’s actually in.)

Unfortunately, the film makes a fatal error by giving Remy an on-the-job accident that requires him to get an artificial heart from his own company. Back on the streets, he suddenly finds reserves of sympathy for those he disembowels, and is unable to carry out any of his job tickets—he’s lost the heart for it. (GET IT?) There’s not nearly enough audience goodwill built up for Remy to indulge him in his revelations that life is precious. It’s empty and static, and by the time he’s conveniently cut off by his family and goes on the run to the abandoned housing project of Paradise (GET IT?), the writing’s on the wall.

From here, it’s a full-on Science Fiction After-School Special, as Remy enters an underworld of dirty-yet-plucky folk fleeing repossession (including a sassy nine-year-old surgeon), falls in love with a comely-waif runaway, fights repeatedly and viciously against his ex-partner (sent to repo him, of course), and at last decides to gain freedom for all people, or at least for himself, by finding the Pink Door at Union headquarters and Bringing Down the Man From The Inside. (…Mary Kay?)

These plot markers are largely accomplished through graphic fight scenes, in which Jude Law makes his fight choreographer proud, and the filmmakers finance the entire fake-gore industry for another year. (This is discounting the gore factor of the actual repo scenes.) One of the less explicit fight scenes involves a typewriter dropped from a great height and a pressurized blood balloon. Squeamish moviegoers, take note.

I won’t spoil the last act, not so much out of journalistic integrity as a desire for the unsuspecting to suffer as I suffered. Suffice it to say it’s a series of increasingly-vacuous Big Moments that culminate in a laughably bad denouement—which is nice, I guess, since at least that way the movie gets one laugh.

Larger than my problems with the film itself, though, are my problems with what a film like this represents. With paint-by-numbers violence, stock characters, and half-baked plotting, Repo Men is science fiction only in the vaguest sense. At best, it’s a bad action film in geek’s clothing. At worst, it’s just a marker of how “science fiction” has come to mean “slapping some futuristic CGI over various recycled plot elements and calling it a day.” Repo Men is just another in a long series of examples of why it’s hard for some to believe that science fiction can be an exciting, engaging, and cerebral genre; with friends like Repo Men, who needs enemies?

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com.]

So, I saw Alice in Wonderland over the weekend!

Before the showing, there was a line of about 200 people (half of whom bolted when they realized they’d bought tickets to the NOT 3-D showing), and the two teenage girls ahead of me spent a long time on a conversation like this:

Girl 1: I mean, I just have such a crush or whatever on her because she’s so, like, different, you know? And it’s not just the accent, it’s how she’s so, like, different. Like, not shallow?

Girl 2: Oh god, I’m so tired of shallow people.

Girl 1: Me, too. (pause) How much do we like my new hair?

Girl 2: We LOVE your new hair.

I thought that was amazing and hysterical, until I realized that it was not a punchline; they were stone serious. Then I didn’t know where to look.

That’s pretty much how the movie is; every five minutes Burton does something, and you think, “This cannot be serious, there is a twist coming,” and then you realize there is no twist coming, and that Burton is stone serious, and then you just don’t know where to look.

It’s really a shame, because of all the modern filmmakers who could have taken this on, I would have said that Tim Burton was a pretty solid choice, but we’ve already entered that era where old-Burton would have been a solid choice, and now it’s just him cranking a story through his Whimsy Machine and hoping for the best.

For a more coherent review, read the whole thing at Fantasy Magazine.

For Fantasy this week, leading up to this weekend’s release of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, I look at nine of the most famous, skillful, or notorious movie adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

Watching all nine adaptations in quick succession had two effects on me:

1. I realized that, even though I’m not the biggest fan of the books, it really is a story perfectly suited to film. Most books suffer in translation from paper to screen, but not Alice; since the books themselves are a breezy series of visual metaphors and hidden meanings, there’s almost nothing about it that doesn’t work in film, and it actually allows a filmmaker to use the story as a wholesale metaphor for something else entirely and still maintain the tone of childlike discovery. That doesn’t mean it can’t be disturbing – it absolutely can (I will never, ever watch Neco z Alenky again, ever*) – it just means that the story is more fluid than I would have thought for intentionally plotless nonsense that’s had a hundred years of being a cultural checkpoint going against any sense of freshness, and I enjoyed a lot of these more than I expected to.

2. I was trippin’ balls, dude. I recommend most of these be seen at a maximum rate of two a day, lest you suffer from a glut of wonderment and end up diving for the Euclid just to read about something that makes some sense.

I recommend the 1915 version above all; I’m pretty sure it’s the best one yet made.

However, the best moment in any of them, for my money, is from 1998′s shoestring-budget Alice Through The Looking Glass, in which Kate Beckinsale (back when her face moved) and Ian Holm (as the White Knight) sit together, and the White Knight tells her his tale. The tale is illustrated in silent-movie fashion (Ian Holm as Buster Keaton: SOLD), including fuzzy-audio interludes, and Ian Holm basically gives a five-minute masterclass in dramatic reading.

It’s very quiet, and very weary, and very, very good. If you have a few minutes, it’s highly recommended.

Tim Burton’s Alice goes under my knife this weekend, and the review should appear early next week. After the clips I’ve seen, my feeling right now is: We’ll see about THAT, Burton. I hope he proves me wrong.

* Seriously, this movie has been retroactively added to my list of “Oh, I Don’t Think So” won’t-review movies over at Con or Bust. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to find some other way to make me suffer, though – go bid!