Breaking Dawn, by Stephenie Meyer

[keilexandra]

Breaking Dawn
by Stephenie Meyer
756 pages (hardcover)
Genre: Fiction/Fantasy/YA

What you've heard thus far about Breaking Dawn? All true. I won't bother to repeat the criticisms. Meyer's prose is clunky but bearably so; in this book particularly, she invents way too many minor characters; and she doesn't understand the fundamentals of plot theory

Comments

[beteio]

You can probably imagine my reaction to just reading the words BREAKING DAWN. If you can't, my thought process goes pretty much like this: AHHH TWILIGHT HATE KILL DIE.

Besides that, the first thing that comes to mind reading your notes on the TWILIGHT series's conservatism is the whole CHRONICLES OF NARNIA versus THE GOLDEN COMPASS "thing". You've undoubtedly read about it somewhere, how THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA movies have done ridiculously better than THE GOLDEN COMPASS in theaters, probably due in no small part to the different roles that religion plays in each of them, and the general bashing of THE GOLDEN COMPASS by the religious community.

[keilexandra]

Well, duh. Creationism vs. atheism, which do you think is going to do better? It's progress that GOLDEN COMPASS even got made into a movie.

[gsconahan]

It was made into a fairly bad, dumbed-down movie for kids. If they’d actually made a good movie, it’s possible that those figures would have been entirely different.

I think that if they had actually done justice to the source material, the ideological differences wouldn’t have weighed as much.

[keilexandra]

I haven't seen either movie, but I would bet (if I gambled, which I don't on principle) that they dumbed down the movie to mask the ideology.

[gsconahan]

That’s part of it, yes, and I think the director even admitted to that. But more than that, they seemed determined to make it into a happy little kid’s adventure with lots of cuddly animals and sparkly lights and happy endings, when the book was so dark and complex. They aimed it at entirely the wrong audience.

Narnia had atmosphere and style, where The Golden Compass just had gobs of cheesy CG nonsense. It’s really a pity - they had an excellent cast as well as a great story to work from, but they pretty much threw it away and made a forgettable fireworks show.