April Fools 2015: Film Grimoire

Happiest of Wednesdays to you, amigos! Got a little something to brighten your day: another lovely guest post for April Fools! Today, I’m thrilled to welcome to the exceedingly awesome Miss Anna of Film Grimoire! If you follow me, I’m positive you follow Anna, too, but on the slim chance that you don’t change that…like, right now. So many great film reviews. Also, if you’re looking for a place to see what all the cool bloggers around WordPress have been up to, she has these epic monthly round-up posts. Great content. Be sure to give her a visit! She has a thoroughly surprising but also thoroughly hilarious April Fools twist for you…but I’ll let her talk about that.

***SPOILERS MAY WILL FOLLOW***

I got fooled by a Twilight movie.

Let me explain. With spoilers.

I used to work in a bookshop (actually, a couple of bookshops) for a pretty long time. During that time I felt obligated to read a whole bunch of rubbish that was popular for the sake of being able to talk about it with customers, and one of those pieces of rubbish was The Twilight Saga. Also Fifty Shades of Grey.

When it came time for these stupid Twilight films to come out, I thought there would be no surprises because I couldn’t un-read those stupid works of literature that set the cause of feminism back about sixty years. I had read them and I knew exactly how the stories went, regardless of how much I wanted to forget them. I thought I was totally unsurprisable. That is, until the final film – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012).

During this stupid film and book, there is a huge build up to a massive showdown between our extremely limp protagonists, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) and their big vampire family, and the Volturi, a kind of vampire government body that hails from a beautiful castle in Italy. In the book, the whole story leads up to this showdown. The Volturi hunt down Bella and Edward’s vampire family in order to bring them to justice, due to them creating an ‘abomination’ – a half human, half vampire child. Except that nothing happens. In the book, the vampire family and the Volturi come face to face, only for the Volturi to just acknowledge that Bella and Edward haven’t done anything wrong, and then they leave. That’s it. Back when the book came out (in 2008), I heard it described as a “shitstorm of nothing”, and that description is totally apt.

Hence, the moment I got fooled. In the film, there’s the same lead-up to a big fight with the Volturi. Except this time the fight actually happens! The fight is quite gory and very well choreographed, you get to see vampires’ heads getting ripped off, and a number of main characters actually die, characters who don’t die in the books. The ground even opens up, and vampires and werewolves are tossed into the firey underbelly of the earth’s crust. All things considered, it’s a pretty great fight scene.

I thought this scene was great (compared to the rest of the travesty of the series) because it took a chance. It took the insipid source material and created something engaging and exciting, and it made the really ambitious choice of killing off some characters that fangirls were in love with at the time. Whilst watching, I tipped my imaginary hat to screenplay writer Melissa Rosenberg, who was able to take a non-event and turn it into something interesting.

APRIL FOOLS. The fight scene never happened. It was a figment of the psychic vampire’s power to see what might potentially happen in the future, and it didn’t actually happen. The fight scene occurred solely in her head and all the people/vampires who died are still alive. The fight scene had literally no impact on the story of the film. The film remains just as limp-willed as the book, except that it wasted maybe fifteen minutes of its audience’s time. I was so annoyed and disappointed. I just got fooled. The Twilight films continue to be as lame as ever.

That’s the story of how I got fooled by a Twilight film. You can make fun of me, I don’t mind. This picture sums up my feelings about it pretty well: