
Following the development that the Volturi, the ruling council of vampires last seen in New Moon, are coming after Edward and Bella's daughter Renesmee, the Cullen clan assemble a team of vampires from across the globe to defend the child, the last of which is the enigmatic Alistair. The character of Alistair (Joe Anderson) is a good example.

Perhaps it's fan service, and people familiar with the novels will be able to link things up, but for newcomers it becomes increasingly hard to keep track of who everyone is, why they're involved, and what on earth is happening from one scene to the next. For at least the first two thirds of the film, plot threads and characters are introduced with enough fanfare to make one think they're going to be important cogs in the larger machinery of the story, only to be forgotten or abandoned with zero explanation. Here's the first and biggest of the many problems of Breaking Dawn, part 2. Edward (Robert Pattinson) begins to assume a mentor role, but for whatever reason Bella learns so quickly that the learning plot is pretty much dropped. Picking up exactly at the point where part one ended, Bella (Kristen Stewart) finds herself having to adjust to her 'newborn' vampire status, learning to control her superhuman strength and fighting the urge to hunt humans. While perhaps not as off-the-leash nutty, Breaking Dawn, part 2 maintains a lot of the weirdness of the preceding chapter. It seemed like an appropriate place to end it, but Summit and Stephenie Meyer obviously had other ideas, hence we have Breaking Dawn, part 2. We had seen the unending wedding of Edward and Bella, the banal South American honeymoon, the shocking and genuinely upsetting pregnancy/birth, and the werewolf falling in love with the baby. After seeing part one, it was difficult to see where the story had left to go. Sure, they're terrible, terrible films (and books I assume), the popularity of which paints a sorry picture of the tastes of today's youth, but now that all is said and done, on reflection it was worth enduring the first three insufferable disasters (Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse) to get to the unbridled mayhem of Breaking Dawn (my thoughts on part one can be found here).

It's with a hint of sadness that the Twilight franchise has come to an end.
