I’ve seen all five Twilight movies. Knowing there is inner dialog and motivations going on that cannot be conveyed onscreen has me less focused on why everyone looks so burpy, and more often bored.

Two scenes are pretty good. When Jacob hastily strips before the grown-up audience’s proxy, Bella’s dad, to change into a wolf to PROVE to the dad there are THINGS in this world that are SUPERNATURAL he has NO IDEA about, both actors do a good job selling it as comedy.

The battle scene near the end is cathartic. The special effects are poor, but it’s delightfully brutal and chock full of “Wow, did they just do that?” For people emotionally involved with the characters, it must have been a roller coaster. For a distant observer, it was daring given the constraints.

It also serves as testimony that when heading into battle, thick wool clothing and heavy capes are a LOUSY idea when combatting people in more nimble clothing. Especially weird given vampires don’t need to keep warm. And for a collection of Eurotrash based in Italy, why no Italian accents among the Volturi? It was all that non-committal mid-Atlantic accent where you cannot pinpoint where the character is supposed to be from, other than not AMURHICA.

“Alice” and “Jasper”. They’re not really centuries old.Jasper’s head. It makes me smirk or laugh. A fixation every movie. The actor’s candid photos look normal-ish, but when he’s onscreen, you can sense him reciting to himself: “I am wise and older than I look, oh, the things my character has seen.” Whatever he’s doing, it doesn’t work.

Are the movies lazy about when vampires are pale versus sanguine? Flesh tones are all over the place in this series. If this inconsistency is explained in the books let me know.

CGI Renesme looks awful. Uncanny. They put CGI on her face as a baby, toddler, and grown-up. It floats over where the face should be and lags a tetch behind the body itself. In the baby scenes, I imagined the actors carrying around an infant baby model covered in green and little white dots they use in motion capture and started laughing.

I am the spawn of the undead and a mopey teen, but it is CGI that makes me an abomination.When it was all over, it was like finishing flavorless food. Not flavorless, more like a grilled Velveeta sammich. Took the kids, who had only seen the first movie, and reflected they could follow the story without having seen the intervening three movies.

Is there anyone watching these movies a second time? Anyone truly caught up in the romance? I’m way out of the demographic (moms, teens) but it seems the culture hardly references the films now, no quoting of lines, re-enacting scenes. Watching this “Epic Finale That Will Live Forever”, it felt like a national obligation we were all “Meh” about. Seems unlikely kids will be viewing the movies five years from now. Or two years.