The word on the street is that director David Slade’s Eclipse is the best of the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga to date. Certainly it’s the lightest and brightest — everyone is still chaste, but the movie is actually sexy in parts. It appears to have embraced its own sense of camp and is consistently funny in an intentional way. For the first time, I found myself curious to see what comes next.

But it may be that I’m suffering from a self-preservation instinct, a cinematic Stockholm syndrome. Eclipse marks my third trip to Forks, Wash. Your first time, it’s easy to be snotty about a place. On your second, maybe you grudgingly admit that the eye candy isn’t bad. But the third time your employer sends you to Forks you had better get sucked in or you’ll lose your mind. You have to find the joy in the endless dopey declarations of love, the physical comedy in red-eyed armies of vampires fording deep Northwestern rivers and the titillation in a tent scene that plays like a parody of Brokeback Mountain yet maintains its erotic charge.

We first find Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire beau Edward (Robert Pattinson) embracing in a field of flowers, as they are wont to do. They exchange pretty, dignified kisses, the kind that won’t gross out any 12-year-olds. They save their tongues instead for their usual poetry. “Marry me,” he says. “Change me,” she demands. And so on.

In the context of the world’s most vaunted human-vampire love story (unless, like me, you haven’t gotten over Buffy and Angel), “change me” means make me a vampire. But with socially awkward Bella the subtext is, Relieve me of the human teenaged condition of not fitting in. Not to mention, Are you ever going to put out and change me from virgin to woman? As Bella, Stewart finally seems more confident. She’s stopped fussing with her hair and she seems to relish having some humorous lines. “Do I even want to know what that is?” Bella asks her shape-shifting pal Jacob (Taylor Lautner) when he mentions that his wolf companions “imprint” on other people.

In a prologue, a young man from Forks named Riley (Xavier Samuel) is bloodied on a Seattle dock by an unseen assailant, a scene that sets up the central conflict, a war between the Forks vamps and a new coven in Seattle led by red-haired Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard, replacing Rachelle Lefevre). Revenge is afoot. But the real business at hand is decisionmaking. Bella has said she’ll stay human until after high-school graduation, but that day is fast approaching. The Volturi want her dead or turned. Eclipse is really about making the choice between life and death.

It’s the bridge to the final book, Breaking Dawn, where Bella is, um, finally fulfilled (an event so enormous it will require two box-office expenditures, that is, movies). What is fascinating is how much of Eclipse’s language parrots the language of the never-ending abortion debate. “I envy you, you had a choice,” Rosalie (Nikki Reed), Edward’s vampire “sister” tells Bella. Rosalie was turned a century or so ago by a kindly vampire who found her dying in the street after a gang rape led by her fiancé (now that is a vampire after school special). “I want you to understand all your options,” the beautiful Jacob says, before presenting Bella with the first option: kissing him. She could also rest her head on his warm pectoral, her hand on the third can to the right in his six-pack.

Doesn’t that sound good? That fussy maiden Edward only lets her undo a couple of his shirt buttons. Thus the cinematic versions begin to diverge from its origin. At my preview screening, when Jacob tells Bella, “I’m exactly right for you, Bella; it would be as easy as breathing with me,” the entire audience sighed, a collective expulsion of emotion that said, “Listen to the simmering beefcake!” When her classmate Jessica (the clever Anna Kendrick) gives a graduation speech proclaiming that this is the time to make mistakes, figure out who they want to be, to live, we all want that message to get through to stubborn Bella. But we know it won’t. Anyone who was alive at the time of Breaking Dawn’s release knows Team Jacob is out of luck.

This is not how it was supposed to go down. Edward is supposed to be the Rhett Butler figure, not Jacob. You could chalk this growing dissatisfaction with the overall narrative up to some casting problem, or a screenwriting issue (Lautner does get the funniest lines), except who really thinks that Taylor Lautner is a more compelling presence than Robert Pattinson? What’s happening is that the movies are just demonstrating the central problem with the books: becoming a vampire is a lousy choice. Mutiny may be in order.

The official Summit press notes for “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” are a whopping 113 pages. Some of that includes widely spaced credits at the end, but most of the packet is extensive background information on the film, its source material, the “Twilight” franchise itself and nearly everybody involved with it. Want information on the “Eclipse” gaffers and fluffers? I’ve got that info!

The “Eclipse” press notes had no bearing on my opinion on the film, but I mention them for two reasons:

The first is that somebody put a lot of effort into this packet and, at the very least, had the decency to print it double-sided. It’s a hefty and daunting package to internalize, especially on top of the responsibility to read the entire book series, a responsibility this critic took quite seriously.

The second is that the press notes are a reminder of exactly how essential this franchise is to Summit Entertainment. Yes, the company has had a couple small successes with non-”Twilight” films, but when you get presented with a door-jam-ready set of notes like this, it’s because Summit is the house the Robert Pattinson built, the house that Kristen Stewart decorated and the cars parked out front came courtesy of Taylor Lautner. [Kellen Lutz is responsible for, I dunno, the sconces and whatever Ashley Greene brought to the table, I'm sure it was frilly.]

That’s why it’s interesting that Summit handed “Eclipse” over to David Slade, a former music video director whose only features were a disturbing two-hander about a predatory pedophile and his equally predatory prey (“Hard Candy”) and a gory horror film (“30 Days of Night”) that treated vampires as soulless killing machines, basically the antithesis of their “Twilight” depiction.

It could have been a disaster.

It isn’t. Yup. There’s my rave right there.

“The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” is probably the series’ best film so far and it’s certainly the one most likely to expand the franchise’s reach beyond its devoted (and burgeoning) core. I’m not going out on much of a limb to say that, mind you.

Does that mean that I think “Eclipse” is a particularly great film?Well, not. How about a particularly good film? Probably not that either. It’s still frequently undone by the earnestness of its central love triangle and my limitations of an inherently talky and stagey script, but I’m very well aware that the moments that occasionally (frequently) had me chuckling a little bit derisively (a lot derisively) are exactly the moments that would lead core fans into a revolt if they were trimmed or augmented in any way. Probably more-so even than the “Harry Potter” franchise or Marvel’s various comic adaptations, the “Twilight” films have been made for the fans to the exclusion of all others, so the smartest thing for any reviewer to do, coming at least partially from the outside of the maelstrom, is to give some sort of perspective on how the film handles the things aimed exclusively at fans and what it offers for anybody else.

Full review after the break…

[This review contains some spoilers, but not many. But honestly, is this a movie that requires spoiler warnings? Either you're going to see it because you already know exactly how it ends, or else you're probably smart enough that you'll be able to figure out exactly how it ends. Either way, I could pretty much give a play-by-play of the movie's Werewolves vs. Vampires vs. Frankenstein's Monsters climax and it wouldn't spoil anything, right?]

With the first “Twilight” film, director Catherine Hardwicke introduced the passion for the source material and was such a demonstrative fan herself that viewers ignored a movie which was, at best, technically cheap and amateurish (don’t get me started on the “at worst”). With “New Moon,” Chris Weitz got a bigger budget and delivered a movie which looked professional and competent, but he couldn’t simultaneously be true to an inert book and deliver a movie that wasn’t also inert. Funny how that happens.

Slade is gifted with both an even larger budget and, more importantly, a book that features a driving main plotline and genuine progress in the Edward-Bella-Jacob triangle. With those things in his corner, Slade is able to do something truly noteworthy: He’s able to give “Eclipse” a look that is distinctive from the first two films, at times make this the first movie in the franchise driven by the director rather than screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg’s uber-literal take on Stephenie Meyer’s books.

The directorial fingerprints are visible from the opening scene, in which we escape from Forks for a few minutes for a visit to Seattle, where some creepy things are going on, creepy vampire-related things. In this sequence, the editing is jarring and disorienting. Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography is chilly and evocative. I don’t want to oversell the scene, but it’s *almost* scary and *almost* unnerving and those are two sensations which, for the most part, the franchise hasn’t aspired to previously.

It doesn’t last long, because in no time we’re back to Forks and back to Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) voiceover and back to Bella and Edward (Robert Pattinson) in a sunlit field. On one hand, you see, the plot of “Eclipse” focuses on the scary thing that’s happening in Seattle, where people are going missing and the Cullens have fears of an army of newborn vampires, but that plot is mostly relevant insofar as Bella is about to need protecting and that’s going to require help from Jacob (Taylor Lautner) and his wolf-y buddies. As Edward becomes more and more mopey about the prospect of fulfilling Bella’s desires to become a vampire herself, Jacob is becoming more and more viable as a protector and a potential love interest, forcing Bella to make a choice.

Relative to “New Moon,” “Eclipse” feels both more action-driven *and* more character-driven, which makes you wonder what the heck was going on to fill two hours in the last movie.

The action is delivered in odd bursts, which can be largely blamed on Meyer and her peculiar love for fizzled climaxes and off-screen (or off-page) set pieces. So Slade makes do with at least one vampire training montage and by packing as much vampire-on-werewolf brawling into the big closing fight scene as possible. We’re still not working with especially terrific CGI here — fast-running Victoria (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who isn’t bad, but is certainly distractingly not Rachelle Lefevre) is especially silly — but there’s no doubt that the werewolves look better this time around and that the vampire action is much more engaging when they’re trying to kill things than when they’re playing baseball. Slade, unlike Hardwicke and Weitz, is also capable of producing momentum in the editing room, with the help of regular cutter Art Jones. Since “New Moon” peaked with a leisurely trip to Italy and some less-than-believable cliff-diving this is a tremendous improvement and male viewers (and more than a handful of female viewers) will be grateful.

But Slade didn’t come into “Eclipse” thinking he was supposed to be making a “Transformers” sequel. He respects that for the core viewers, this is a series about yearning glances, florid and declarative pronouncements and passionate, close-mouthed kissing. He shows his understanding for the film’s intimate scope by shooting an unexpected amount of time in tight close-ups. Since “Eclipse” is also being blown up for IMAX venues, this movie should be absolute kibble for fans wanting to experience the sensation of climbing up Lautner’s nose or burrowing deeply into Pattinson’s pores.

[Yes, actually, you *can* have too many close-ups. I wasn't in love with the rudimentary grammar of the style, but I liked the actors' willingness to be shot at sometimes-less-than-complimentary angles and in less-than-flattering light. These folks are all kinda famous for their prettiness and while sometimes Slade is very kind to them, he's also sometimes harsh.]

In the second movie, with Pattison miserable and tortured the whole time and Lautner upbeat and topless, it felt as if Bella was chugging along in the direction of making a very wrong choice. Here, there’s more balance and, as a result, Bella’s decision is more proactive and less of a literary default.

Oddly, although the stakes in this love triangle are higher than ever, the characters and the actors seem looser than ever. Edward makes at least one joke! Jacob makes at least one joke! Bella cracks a smile! And there are scenes between all three characters in which you can see the actors relaxing a little and no longer feeling the pressure of 50 million swooning teens (and nearly as many swooning viewers of other ages) on their shoulders. The Tent Scene — readers of the book need no more explanation — is effective and humanizing for all involved, even though it’s set in one of the most ridiculous looking fake snow storms I’ve ever seen. It’s still a problem that a half-dozen brief seconds of levity in a two-hour movie is cause for celebration.

And, of course, for every scene late allows the young stars to show more dimension — Pattison benefits most from the fresh shadings, while Lautner proves most limited — there are scenes so earnest that nary a thespian alive could come out unscathed. Meyer’s ideological feelings about pre-marital sex and the glories of abstinence are one thing on the page, where you can skim them and move on, but on the big screen with actors actually saying the words? With Bella climbing all over Edward, trying to tear her clothes off and begging him to have sex with her and Edward pulling back and launching into a lengthy speech about the courtly virtues of chaste romance? I’m not making any judgment on the message itself, merely the impossibility of it being convincingly conveyed in this venue. It’s hilarious, especially in a movie that goes on and on about Bella’s power and her ability to make her own choices, only to take away her sexual agency once she makes that choice.

Also less plausible on the screen than on the page is the moment at which Jacob basically forces himself on Bella, which read a good deal more rape-y (or sexual assault-y) on the page, but has been transformed into a slightly inappropriate purloined smooch here.

[Side note: Kristen Stewart does less lip-biting in this movie. Significantly less lip biting. I don't know if that was a choice she made, if that was a choice Slade impressed upon her or if it was a choice made in the editing room. But pay attention. There may not be any lip-biting at all. That won't stop lazy online video parodies from being all about lip-biting, but somebody ought to give Stewart credit for breaking from that nervous tic and it might as well be me.]

Returning again to my point that Slade and Rosenberg somehow got much more overall value out of “Eclipse,” the movie is full of exposure for some of the less featured supporting characters from past installments. Several members of the Cullen clan get to tell their origin stories, allowing Jackson Rathbone to make his first actual impression to-date and letting Nikki Reed escape from the “Boy she’s miscast!” ghetto that she’s been stuck in since the first movie. Peter Facinelli gets several good monologues as well, though Carlisle has a new accent in this movie that I’m pretty sure was absent previously. And while I excused Stewart and Pattison for their difficulties espousing abstinence with a straight face, I should salute Billy Burke for pulling off a perfectly believable version of The Talk with his on-screen daughter, a scene that only served to re-convince me that Burke is the most underrated part of this entire franchise.

Ack. This review somehow became very long. Can I find a way to bottom line this? “Eclipse” isn’t the first great movie in the “Twilight” franchise, but it had more moments in it that I enjoyed than the first two movies combined. And the parts I didn’t enjoy? Well, you’ll probably love them too. I’m glad to offer Summit the pull quote, “‘Eclipse’ is the ‘Twilight’ movie you’ll feel least bad watching,” but I somehow doubt that’ll make the press notes for the next one.

[And yes, I'm rather insanely curious about how Melissa Rosenberg and Bill Condon are going to pull off *anything* in their two-part adaptation of "Breaking Dawn." The sex, the imprinting, the climactic battle that builds into nothing? That is going to take some courage to pull off.]

Nothing much has changed in the Twilight universe and if there’s a problem with Eclipse that’s the biggest one. I’m told repeatedly by fans that the next movie gets really crazy, but for now we’re sort of stuck rehashing the same story we saw in the last movie. A depressed, awkward girl named Bella (Kristen Stewart) is in love with a vampire (Robert Pattinson). Her vampire feels terribly guilty about this and wishes she’d stop. Meanwhile, Bella’s being politely stalked by a roid-raging werewolf named Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who hopes to steal her away from the other guy before he finally gets around to sucking out her blood. This is a job I’m fairly confident any other slightly self-respecting vampire would have gotten done before the end of movie one, but here we are in the third film still debating the same old blood sucking issues.

Maybe that’s not all bad. The best thing about Eclipse is that it at least attempts to treat complex emotions in a complex way. Any other love story would have had these two married and honeymooning in Vegas long ago, but Eclipse, even more so than the other two films, is determined to examine their feelings and their relationship possibilities from every angle. It addresses difficult questions without resorting to easy answers and spends a lot of time wondering whether a teenage girl is capable of making the right decision when she’s besotted. It forces its male characters into hard romantic choices, and asks them to wonder whether being in love with someone is enough.

Eclipse’s best scene happens in a tent where permanently shirtless Jacob and permanently pale Edward, bitter enemies till now, finally lay their cards on the table and find common ground in their love for Bella. It’s a scene which could have been filled with romantic platitudes, but instead it’s laid out with a kind of naïve honesty in which both characters confess their failings and decide the girl they care about is more important than whatever prejudices they hold against each other. It’s also the place where Twilight finally establishes that Bella, till now mostly a bland pawn, actually has some say in things. Both potential lovers agree they’ll let her decide between them, as if had they wanted, they could have made the choice for her. Would Bella mind if they did? She protests, but somehow I don’t think she would.

Still the complexity with which Eclipse attempts to address these issues is in its own way admirable, but at some point maybe it’s also too much. The biggest problem here, as it was with the other two movies, is the material on which it’s based. The thing is, at least in the broader strokes, these just aren’t very good stories. Individual moments sometimes work but there’s never really a big picture beyond Bella’s obsession with Edward that seems to matter or make any real sense. There’s some attempt to set up a broad vampire conspiracy, but all of that seems utterly out of step with all the romantic pondering going on through the rest of the movie. It feels like it’s only there as an afterthought, because the author knew that even teenage girls can only take so much romantic introspection.

And maybe that’s the real problem. A lot of Eclipse plays out like filler. At times it indulges in flashbacks, which do nothing to move the story. Bella goes to graduation, but it plays no real role in the narrative. Her human friends make another cameo, but they have no impact on her life other than to take up space next to Bella at a party. There’s a big battle, but it feels like it’s only there for the sake of having a big battle.

At least this time the action sequences make some attempt to be entertaining. They’re not particularly well staged, the final fight takes place in an open field which we’re told gives the outnumbered Cullen coven a tactical advantage. Except standing in an open field waiting for superior forces to walk out of the forest and slaughter you was sort of discredited as a legitimate tactic somewhere around the Revolutionary War. Yet while the tactics are bad and some of the special effects aren’t perfect, they’re still a big step up from the previous movies. Director David Slade has a lot of fun pounding the diamond-constructed vampires of Stephanie Meyers’ world into literal dust. It’s not the hardcore fanged killing of Slade’s last vampire movie, 30 Days of Night, but lost in the Twilight wilderness, it’ll do.

Yet even those battles are just sort of there to break up all the endless talking about Edward and Bella’s relationship. Twilight: Eclipse is fairly well acted and directed, but what is it that all this effort is being put into creating? Twilight: Eclipse works well enough, but what are we watching? It’s really just an endless conversation about an immature, moody, generally unlikable, teenage girl’s feelings. In a world without money to be made, maybe that wouldn’t have deserved three full movies. Please Bella, grow up.

The only thing that makes the “Twilight” films tolerable for non-fans of the Stephanie Meyer franchise is the constant presence of Kristen Stewart, an actor who never seems to be doing much but is almost unfailingly bewitching doing it. But from the opening minutes of “Eclipse,” the third of what will eventually be five films adapted from the four novels, I felt something was a little off about Stewart this time. At first I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it had something to do with over- immaculate grooming. Her eyebrows had gotten smaller, trimmed to widen the gap between them, contributing a feel of beauty salon phoniness. Was this responsible, in turn, for the heavy-liddedness of her right eye not having quite the breathtaking sultry effect it usually does? Maybe, to a certain extent. But there was still something else. Finally, it was obvious: It was her hair. Too straight, matted down, tended to, fussed into lifelessness. Was she wearing too many extensions? Even a wig?

I didn’t learn until afterwards what all fans already knew, that Stewart had to wear a mop due to her short cut for “The Runaways.” (And, yes, the eyebrows were different too.) Why does this minor degree of falseness matter in a movie bulging with matty-furred werewolves and fancy-haired vampires sporting golden sepia contact lenses? Precisely because Stewart’s Bella Swan is the sole pure, uncorrupted, virginal, natural state human being of note in the universe of the film, and anything that detracts from that image is bound to disruptive, even if subliminally. The viewer gazes at Stewart almost continuously for two hours, and so consistent and unerring is her work that the slightest false note sticks out like a broken rib.

Because exposition is now mostly out of the way and the rivalry for Bella between Robert Pattinson’s courtly vampire and Taylor Lautner’s more physically imposing werewolf is equally balanced, “Eclipse” arguably has the best story of the “Twilight” entries. But while the action and the male conflict does lift the film’s second half, a general, modestly swooning lethargy still prevails as the dominant trait of this series. That much of its appeal stems from the beautiful young faces and bodies on display has been apparent from the first installment, which benefitted from the freshness of audience discovery (the frequency with which Lautner shows up this time with his shirt off provoked laughs from the Los Angeles preview screening audience, as did the movie’s best line, delivered by Lautner to Pattinson, in reference to their respective characters’ body tempratures: “Let’s face it, I’m hotter than you!”). But “New Moon” virtually suffocated from its langorous listlessness and director David Slade, whose debut feature “Hard Candy” was so tense and edgy, has been able to reignite the general dynamics less than I’d hoped he might. The PG-13 rating has evidently dictated a virtually gore-free battle royal between the encroaching Newborn vampire clan and the uneasy alliance between the werewolves and more senior vampires (now equiped with backstory flashbacks revealing how some of them made the switch), with decapitations and other dimemberments demonstrating how desperately devoid of blood these vampires (and, by extension, the films) really are.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is like some broodingly repressed wide-screen youth-pop melodrama from the 1950s — and I mean that as a compliment. The story, at heart, is earnest and humorless teen romantic glop, but its feelings aren’t fake, and the movie is compulsively watchable; it has a passionflower intensity. In case you haven’t been keeping up, the plot — and the blood — have thickened a lot since the first Twilight film two years ago. In that initial, relatively uncomplicated chapter, the ever-so-mildly dark and alienated Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) fell for the dashing vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) because of his pasty-faced erotic appeal (sideburns, James Dean hair, golden eyes, eternal stricken look), but also because he offered himself up as the ultimate protector: swoony and chivalrous, a spangly-skinned knight of the woods who vowed to guard her innocence.

In Eclipse, adapted from the third novel in Stephenie Meyer’s girl-power-meets-retro-Harlequin fantasy series, Bella now needs to be saved from no one so much as herself. She loves Edward so completely that her fears about his “otherness” have been all but dissolved. She can’t wait to go over to the undead side, and to lose her virginity, too — though Edward, ever the gentleman, has other ideas. He’ll agree to make her a vampire only if she marries him (he seems to propose about every third scene). The more idealized their love becomes, the more it attracts danger like the storm clouds roiling over the Pacific Northwest.

In Seattle, an army of fresh, hungry vampires — ”newborns” — has gone on a rampage. Since they’ve only just recently been ”converted” and still have remnants of human blood, they’re more ruthless and insatiable than older vamps; their genesis may be revenge, but we can sense its ultimate effect — to destroy Bella and Edward. The other threat to the couple’s love comes from Jacob Black, the snub-nosed Quileute Indian werewolf played with quick responses and a rock-steady gaze by Taylor Lautner, who’s like the young Matt Damon in the body of Marky Mark. Prior to Eclipse, Jacob nurtured his crush on Bella mostly from afar, but now he emerges as a furious, literally hot-blooded rival for her affection. When she insists that she’s with Edward, he narrows those dagger eyebrows and basically says: You love me — you just don’t know it yet. Which is a little scary. In Eclipse, Edward and Jacob square off like two king jocks, each devoted to making Bella his prize. Confronted with this much ardent male protection, a girl could die.

As always, Stephenie Meyer is not the most seamless of storytellers. She sets up soap opera horror-movie situations that stutter and ramble forward, muffled by those declarations of adolescent devotion and by Bella’s own tentative, hemming-and-hawing nature. The movie, directed by David Slade (Hard Candy) from a screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, attempts to turn the passive Bella into more of an aggressor, the brave one who yearns to dissolve Edward’s caution. Yet there are moments when Kristen Stewart’s acting gets a little too moody and remote. That said, she sulks and pines gorgeously, and the film, though it could have used a sharper narrative, coasts along on all that nakedly intense teen emotion. Pattinson, like James Dean, holds back so much that it’s cathartic when he finally lets loose. And the battle between the newborn vamps and a coalition of Edward’s vampire clan and the werewolves is thrillingly shot and edited. It’s not just a war of F/X but a true demon power struggle.

The Twilight movies, like the books on which they’re based, are often mocked. But that’s only because we’re still, on some level, getting used to the novelty of a highly contemporary blockbuster saga that’s this rooted in old-fashioned, borderline masochistic girlish romantic rapture. The movie version of Eclipse, with its dueling boy-monster hunks — a chaste orgy of male gazing — revels in the power that Bella experiences by giving herself over to the powerlessness of love. The movie is about a girl’s primal dream of being desired. That may well be corny, but it’s also an essential antidote to summer-movie hardware. B+

TheLionShare: Yesterday on WFE was very exciting. No love lost between Jacob and August. Love found? Maybe…

WFEfilm: Apparently #WFE Jacob received a ‘pie in the face’ today… ;0) and August made a speech… #WFEfilming

Thom_Thumb_: What an epic day on the set of WFE… Pied rob over 10 times and all us clowns took fabulous still shots with Reese! ;op

WFEfilm: #WFE Jacob also received a smooch from Marlena and the coochie girls today as part of his ‘hazing’ and ‘w…

actorpat Fun day on #WFE. Rob got pies to the face & showgirl kisses.

kevinketcham: All the roustys want to say congrats to our vet. Rob for eclipse we are sure it will be great, u ladies enjoy”

Surely you Twi-hards are not pleased at the latest review of Eclipse. If you’re a fan of the franchise you’re going to see the movie anyway, if you’re not, you probably aren’t even reading this item.

We think Eclipse is the best out of the three films, as does Kristen Stewart and the majority of the Twilight cast. Stewart gives one more final promo-push as to why you all need to see this movie:

“It has more than a few elements that makes it different than the other two movies…we still hold on to the love story, but it’s taken to a whole new level…It gives [Bella] perspective, suddenly she’s like I want [Edward], I don’t need him, I can totally have someone else and so it makes it more human. It’s not the ideal love story that’s in the first one.”

Dying to know your thoughts as you all flock to the theaters this week. Did Eclipse live up to its hype?

What is your favorite Twilight Saga movie?

• Eclipse
• New Moon
• Twilight

2. Robert Pattinson – 315

O happy day. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse finally opens today after weeks of hype surrounding its stars.

Top actor: Robert Pattinson
Runner-up: Brad Pitt
A busy Pattinson eclipses beach-going Pitt, thanks to the latest installment of The Twilight Saga.