Cancel your weekend plans, the entire Twilight Saga just hit Netflix!
Yes, a crucial moment in the Twilight renaissance is finally upon us: all five movies streaming in one place. These movies need no further introduction – we all know about them, whether or not we want to. Twilight took over the world 13 years ago, never quite left our collective consciousness, then came back with a vengeance during quarantine.
It’s hard to pinpoint what about them has such a lasting and inescapable effect. Maybe it’s movie stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, who have since surpassed their roles into ultimate superstardom, as successful actors who frequently deliver in strange and impressive new roles. Maybe it’s the classic, tale-as-old as time, star-crossed lovers dynamic between Edward and Bella. Maybe it’s the love triangle, or the sparkling vampires, or the fact that these movies hit the sweet spot between horrifically bad and peak cinema.
The important takeaway is that we as a society will never escape Twilight and it’s time to stop trying. Embrace the masterpiece, head to Netflix, and accept that sparking vampire as your God! And if you still can’t, we have 5 reasons why you must. Below are five of the best scenes from the Twilight saga, five sparkling reasons to revisit the series ASAP.
Twilight: The Pitch Heard Around The World (Timestamp – 1:18:47)
Twilight is indisputably the best in the series, for more reasons than there’s time to list. Catherine Hardwicke‘s distinct vision and blue palette give the movie a certain flair that sets it apart from the others. But what puts it over the edge is its best aesthetic choice by far: the baseball scene.
You don’t know what you want in life until a vampire puts on a pinstripe baseball outfit and throws a ball at 500 mph while thunder and Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole crackle in the background. Once this scene enters your life, you will never stop thinking about it. It occurs late in the movie after Edward invites Bella to play baseball with his family during a thunderstorm.
Always naive, Bella says “I didn’t know vampires liked baseball.” Thanks to this scene, now the whole world knows. For a glorious three minutes, the Cullens show off their vampire superstrength and immense speed by playing a high-powered round of America’s favorite pastime. Alice throws an impossible pitch, Jasper does a beautiful bat twirl and Rosalie calls Emmett her “spider-monkey.” The Cullens have honestly never been more attractive. More importantly, they’ve never had this much fun together.
Sure, nothing they’re doing is humanly possible, but they’ve also never seemed more like a human family than the moment where Emmett and Edward tackle each other in midair.
Runner ups:
Edward Catching Bella’s Scent: Boy meets girl, and boy thinks to himself, is this the woman I want to murder?
Bella Rides Edward Up a Hill: “You better hold on tight, spider-monkey.”
New Moon: Bella’s Deep, Deep Depression (Timestamp – 28:20)
With each passing year, I understand this scene a little deeper. And yes, that is depressing, but isn’t eternal sadness what the Twilight Saga is all about?
After Edward abandons Bella in a forest (an excellent breakup technique and clearly the mark of a marriage-worthy man) she enters a state of depression. New Moon illustrates her emotional state by parking Stewart at Bella’s bedroom window and having the camera circle around her still chair. You know, to show the passage of time. Months go by — October through December — and Bella stays in place, unmoving. It’s not literal of course, Bella doesn’t actually sit at her window for the entirety of fall (she’d have to already be a vampire to get away with that). But it’s an effective way to show the depths of her pain.
Bella’s feeling the sort of emptiness that blends the days together. The world keeps on turning, but she’s lost the will to engage with it. She remains in her dark room, unable to care. After a year of watching the world from our windows, it’s not too hard to see the scene’s resonance. Whether or not Edward Cullen warrants this level of deep emotion is up for debate (he doesn’t), but Bella’s sadness is very real.
Runner-ups:
Ghost Edward: If I ride a motorcycle recklessly enough, will Robert Pattinson appear?
Jacob’s Transformation: Why can’t Bella meet one normal boy?! Not Mike though, he doesn’t count.
Eclipse: The Love Triangle At Its Best (Timestamp – 1:25:15)
Forget everything I said before, this is the BEST scene in the saga. Jacob (Taylor Lautner) literally looks Edward in the eyes and says, “Face it, I am hotter than you.”
The plot of this movie doesn’t matter — all you need to know is that the famous love triangle is camping out, it’s freezing cold outside, and Bella needs warmth. She’s only human, after all. Sadly, her vampire boyfriend has no body heat and in fact, brings her temperature down just by touching either. But her werewolf best friend (who is very in love with her) is like a walking furnace. Good thing he’s around!
Edward isn’t a fan of Jacob, or his body heat, or his love for Bella, but if he wants her to survive the night, he’ll have to push all that aside. So he does and sits on in agony as Bella cuddles close to Jacob, who is just so much hotter than him. This is what love triangles are made for: tense awkwardness! Wanting someone, but needing someone else!
Runner-ups:
Rosalie’s Backstory: Because she’s easily the best character in the series.
Training Montage: Jasper doesn’t always have a Southern accent, but when he does, it’s because he’s reminding us that he was once a Confederate soldier.
Breaking Dawn Part 1: Giving Birth (Timestamp – 01:30:00)
Most of Breaking Dawn Part 1 is a really obvious, vaguely alarming anti-abortion rant. But if you cover your ears through most of that, you’re rewarded with the most disturbing scene yet — the birth of Renesmee Cullen.
If you were charmed by Edward before, it’s only because you don’t know what giving birth to his child would look like. Turns out it is a terrible, bloody mess. Shot like a horror movie, the final moments of Breaking Dawn show the recently married and still 18-year-old Bella giving birth to her hybrid child. It’s a disturbing process that involves her spine breaking, her knees shattering and her in-utero-child eating its way out of her stomach. By this point, Bella already resembles a skeleton, because the child was consuming every ounce of nutrients in her body while also rejecting any and all food.
So this scene is actually incredibly unpleasant and you might be better off closing your eyes… But it’s also intense, dramatic, and delightfully weird. For middle school girls, this was the must-see movie of the year, and if you keep that in mind throughout this scene, your brain will definitely break.
What’s left to say? Good sex comes at a price. Don’t marry a vampire unless you can handle the horrifically graphic consequences.
Runner-Ups:
Bella Drinks Blood: Everything tastes better when you drink it out of a straw.
Breaking The Bed: How Bella survived this scene, we will never know.
Breaking Dawn Part 2: The Final Battle (Timestamp – 1:24:20)
This scene is so good, it’s unreal. Literally.
Breaking Dawn Part 2 culminates in a final face-off between the Cullens and the Volturi. In the books, that’s all this scene is — a final standoff, before they decide not to fight after all because it was all a misunderstanding. But that’s a terrible way to end a series of five movies, so they wrote in a fight scene. And it was glorious.
You don’t often want the heroes to lose, and you’re probably rooting for the Cullens during this fight, but it’s also pretty solid fun to see Carlisle get his head torn off. This scene is the kind of all-out action you expect from a series about vampires and werewolves — heads torn off, magical powers at full force, a sinkhole consuming the villains. Your typical, epic finale stuff. Except none of it actually happens.
Runner ups:
Jacob revealing himself: Charlie can’t catch a break.
Bella Meets Renesmee: “You nicknamed my daughter after the Loch Ness monster?!”
The post The Five Essential Scenes of ‘The Twilight Saga’ to Revisit Now That All the Films Are Streaming appeared first on /Film.
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