Title: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Studio: Summit Entertainment
Director: David Slade
Actors: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Xavier Samuel, Jackson Rathbone

I learned at a young age that you should never look directly at an eclipse. Truer words were never spoken.

But I won’t waste much time bashing the third instalment of the mega-popular, angst-porn series. It’s far too easy, and to be honest, kind of pointless. By now, you already know which camp you belong to: the Twi-hards, with their hardcore Twilight tattoos and hilarious trailer reaction videos or the normal people, with their sanity. No bad review will convert you if you already know you’re going to watch this eleven times, nor is it necessary for those who would rather lick sandpaper than watch Kristen Stewart look constipated for 124 minutes.

So with that out of the way, what more is there to say? Well, for starters, it might be interesting to note that this is probably the best movie in the series. Of course, that’s like being the prettiest girl at the ugly fair, but hey, it’s something. Also, there is actually some sort of theme beyond the usual love triangle this time around, and the writers made some sort of attempt to develop a couple of the side characters, previously left to rot in space-filler purgatory.

By the way, that theme I referred to is “the value of one’s humanity”. You see, Bella is graduating high school in a month, and she’s decided that once she does, she wants to be turned into a sparkly ghoul like her greasy boyfriend (boy-fiend?) Anyway, much of the movie is about the sacrifices she would have to make in her life, who it would affect, and why she should reconsider. In a series that is completely, endlessly obsessed with this bland girl’s love life, it’s nice to get a peek into a theme that almost appears to give the movie a bit of depth. Small steps, Twilight. Small steps.

But much like the other two movies in the series, Eclipse’s biggest handicap remains: its lead character. The most bearable moments of the film are when characters who are not Bella get long stretches of dialogue or occasionally talk to each other without Bella. Predictably, they always talk about Bella or something directly related to Bella, but at least you get a few seconds worth of people who speak with some sort of inflection in their voice and who don’t remind you of boring heroin addicts.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is an improvement over the series’ previous efforts, but it’s still a bad movie. Never-ending love triangle drama, bloodless battle sequences, and a lead plainer than yogurt, all amount to two hours you could better spend actually staring at an eclipse. Who needs retinas anyway?