Twilight: Eclipse Is One for the Fans

The talky third installment in the Twilight saga has better acting and a more coherent plot line than its predecessors, say critics. But while fans of the teen vampire romance series certainly won't leave disappointed, Eclipse doesn't have much to offer the uninitiated.

• "With roughly 20 minutes of its 2-hour running time devoted to characters doing something besides alternately moping and declaring their eternal love for each other, Eclipse stands as the most action-packed entry yet in the Twilight series," writes Genevieve Koski at the AV Club, praising new director David Slade's more dynamic action sequences.

• The acting has improved noticeably and the stars have developed a great rapport, writes Rene Rodriguez at the Miami Herald, but the lack of imagination in Eclipse "proves the series will never be more than its marketable hook: a love story geared for young adolescent girls populated by innocuous, wimpy monsters."
• Eclipse is the best Twilight film by far, according to Betsy Sharkey at the Los Angeles Times. Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, she writes, "finally, finally have figured out how to breathe life into the characters first created by publishing phenom Stephenie Meyer."
• The movie looks good but it doesn't have any more pulse than the vampires, complains Mike Scott at the Times-Picayune. It's so much of a fans-only movie, he writes, that Slade "doesn't even bother filling in his audience on what happened in the previous two chapters."

(More The Twilight Saga: Eclipse stories.)