What’s disappointing then, is how uninteresting and bland The Twilight Saga: Eclipse ends up being as a viewing experience. That is, all hyperbole aside, one of the coolest movie pitches of all time. Enraged by the murder of her spectral soulmate, James ( Cam Gigandet), red-headed vampire Victoria ( Bryce Dallas Howard) creates an army of juiced-up, superpowered young vampires to exact her revenge on the Cullen family. What boggles the mind is how incredibly interesting the film is when boiled down to its most basic story beats. This is bottom-of-the-barrel Twilight material, folks. RELATED: Every 'Twilight' Book, Ranked From Worst to Best Below is our ranking of the five Twilight films, from worst to best.

With well over a decade since the first film's release, it truly begs the question: Were the Twilight movies really as bad as many made them out to be? It’s our belief that, like most things, the flames of pop culture witch hunts are fanned by superfluous disdain, and that despite many legitimate issues, there is a ton of fun to be had with these cheesy yet earnest young adult romance films. Even within cinephile circles, there are countless video essays viscerally breaking down and ridiculing every frame of the movie. For every kid poring over Meyers’ books, there were dozens of cynical netizens copy-pasting “still a better love story than Twilight” into the comment section of any mention of the series. While each film proved to be a financial success for the studios, critics and pop culture gatekeepers were far less kind to the little story of a high school girl who becomes enchanted by a vampire in the Pacific Northwest. The films also served as early career boosts for then-budding stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner. The series was beloved by pre-teens, and infamously more so by their swooning parents with video clips depicting swarms of mothers descending upon movie theaters regularly circulating local news channels. What followed was a multimedia empire surrounding the intellectual property, including five additional books (with two rumored to be in the works) and five movies. When Stephanie Meyer published her first book, Twilight, in 2005, nobody could have imagined the size and scope of the popularity it would later amass.

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