Eclipse is the third film from The Twilight Saga. While the series didn’t start out as a quartet of movies the first film, Twilight did so well it spawned the successive sequels (New Moon, and now Eclipse). We’re talking about a juggernaut. That’s an unstoppable force, which is not to say that the film is good or bad so much as to warn of its hurricane like effect at the box office.

More than likely whatever zeitgeist Eclipse has tapped into at the current moment will have elapsed when the target audience, which is huge, ages into another generation. Eclipse works its way into a frothy melodrama even while telling the story of teens adjusting to young adulthood, and the fact some of them are wolf-people and some are vampires. Maybe Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner wouldn’t be caught dead in a weekday afternoon soap opera, yet here they are in a bizarre love triangle so overwrought it would put a telenovela to shame.

At least Eclipse looks like a film with nice establishing shots of forests and CGI effects that are only slightly annoying. The cosmology of monsters pulls a 180 turn. Here the werewolves don’t change in front of our eyes from man to beast, and the vampires walk around during the day and are reflected in mirrors. There’s no blood despite various PG-13 removable head and limb moments. And are the wolfs supposed to be that big? I guess so; every shot of Wolfie makes him look like a horse standing next to K-Stew.

Eclipse will make its mark as a big summer hit but you’re going to look foolish months from now if you have the eventual DVD sitting on your shelf. Because who is ever going to watch this again?

- Michael Bergeron