eclipse

When we last saw Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), the teen beauty who insists on seeing herself as an ugly duckling, and her dreamy vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), they had weathered both a major relationship crisis and a run-in with the vampire world’s sinister elite, the Volturi, who decreed that their romance could end one of two ways. Bella could become a vampire or she could die.

As Eclipse—based on the third of four novels by Stephenie Meyer—begins, Bella and Edward (who’s 109 to her 17, making their amour fou more than a little creepy, which is the kind of thing you notice if you just don’t get it) are working out the details of her transformation. Edward will change her shortly after graduation (why the younger Cullens repeatedly subject themselves to the ordeal of high school is a mystery) and wants to get married at the same time; Bella, however, is more comfortable with becoming a blood-drinking ghoul than a bride, having been traumatized by her parents’ divorce. The movie’s theme, reiterated often and obviously, has been established: Life is about choices and consequences.

And then there are the complications: Bella’s dad (Billy Burke) dislikes Edward (if only he knew the louche-looking boyfriend, afraid of what he might do in the throes of vampire passion, is the reason Bella remains a virgin), and her best friend since childhood, studly Native-American shape-shifter Jacob (Taylor Lautner), is in a world-class sulk, Bella apparently being the only person in the Pacific Northwest who doesn’t know he’s been crushing on her for years. And Edward’s adopted sister, Alice (Ashley Greene), is having visions of feral vamp Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard) up to no good: Could she be behind a rash of vicious murders and disappearances in nearby Seattle, and can the werewolves and vampires put aside their centuries-old enmity to protect Bella?

Director David Slade, picking up where Catherine Hardwicke ( Twilight) and Chris Weitz ( New Moon) left off, has a short but thoroughly apropos resume, consisting of the straight-up vampire bloodbath 30 Days of Night (2007) and art-house shocker Hard Candy (2005), about a coltish adolescent’s double-edged flirtation with a suave sexual predator. Were Eclipse not the third part of a golden juggernaut yoked to its PG-13 rating, he might have given it a dangerous edge. But Meyer’s sensibility, brilliantly attuned to the contradictory inner lives of tweens enraptured by fairy-tale romance but skittish about the power of raw, visceral lust, trumps all: Edward is sexy yet soulful, an artfully neutered object of desire, while Jacob’s inner beast is firmly leashed and nobody is getting any.

Eclipse has a certain sense of humor that Twilight and New Moon lacked: Confronted for the umpteenth time by Jacob’s artfully toned abs, Edward snarls, “Doesn’t he own a shirt?” But the disconnect between message and material is often unintentionally hilarious; witness the scene in which cold-blooded Edward must let Jacob rescue Bella from hypothermia by crawling into her sleeping bag. It should crackle with perverse erotic tension, but it’s a hoot and a half instead: No sex please, we’re sensitive.

Thematic gaffes aside, the CGI werewolves continue to be a huge liability; even allowing for the special-effects truism that flashy monsters are easy and house cats are hard (because everyone knows exactly what cats look like, from the pebbly texture of their noses to the way their fur thins at the base of their ears), the wolves are illusion-shatteringly fake. And the entire hair department should be fired on the basis of Cullen patriarch Peter Facinelli’s brassy blond locks alone: It’s not nitpicking if a character’s hair is less plausible than the love triangle between a werewolf, a vampire and a moody teen.