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Emmett and Charlie Swan need to have a spin off where they fight crime in a small southern town.

Emmett is awesome. Idon’t ever talk about his book version because there’s never *enough* there to talk about. But in Eclipse, he had a few great moments. He wanted to go into Seattle and sort out the problem of the newborn vampires. The others shot him down. He also knew that if the army was being built up, they were better off fighting them early when the numbers weren’t unfavorable. He points out what is dumb, what doesn’t work, and why the rest of the Cullens are such cowards.

But in the movie of Eclipse, this is even better. He congratulates Bella for punching Jacob in the face after Jacob assaults her, he actively talks and plans with everyone for dealing with the newborn army. He’s focused on Victoria, and when they were chasing her he’s the one that almost had her. He doesn’t display any racism towards the werewolves, fighting happily beside them.

Movie!Charlie suffers none of the derailment his book version does. He is one of the most realistic, sympathetic, funny, and heart-breaking characters I’ve seen in recent cinema. Billy Burke plays him brilliantly as a man who knows his daughter is slipping away but he never stops fighting for her. He’s also actively involved in the plot; he’s worried about the number of missing people from the areas around Forks, some of whom are being murdered by the newborns, a problem, you’ll remember, which the Cullens are ignoring. Best of all, we see him get involved and confront Edward and Jacob when they are shouting at each other after that little rape-kiss. And what does Charlie do?

He looks appalled. And he never speaks to Jacob again through the whole movie.

Yeah. That’s right. He didn’t congratulate a rapist.

The characters of Charlie and Emmett deserve their own spinoff. The movie writers found the good parts of their characters and wrote them well.

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Jasper is repentant

Book!Jasper is a murder and cold manipulator. He’s scarier than Edward Cullen, and rivals Bella Swan for sheer evil. Edward may fantasize about torture, but we actually SEE Jasper torture a newborn vampire in The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner with his powers of emotional manipulation. In Midnight Sun, he almost goes behind the Cullens’ back in order to murder Bella because there’s a slight possibility that she knows that the family isn’t normal. He makes it clear in the books that the only reason he drinks animal blood is because to do otherwise would make Alice unhappy. He refrains from murder because it would make his girlfriend unhappy. He actively hopes Bella is insane with bloodlust when she’s Embraced because it would make his poor self-control look better. He has a disturbing number of torture/murder fantasies, doubly disturbing because he focuses exclusively on women. He tries to get the Cullens to juice up on human blood in preparation for the battle because it will give them a strength boost, despite requiring at least six murders.

In short, Jasper is a fucking monster in the books.

And I think the filmmakers saw that too, because in the movie version of Eclipse they humanized him and made him sympathetic. In the book, he went along with Maria’s plan of building a newborn army and then disposing of it when the battle was over pretty much for no adequately explained reason. In the movie, they play up the idea that Maria seduced him and made him think that she loved him in order to get him to do her bidding.

In the book, Jasper enjoyed being Maria’s general until their side started losing. Then he decided maybe bail on this and kill Maria in the process. But in the movie we see him kill one of the newborns she doesn’t want. It’s a twelve-year-old-boy, and he looks regretful, horrified, and sickened by what he’s done. He does it anyway because Maria has him twisted up into her creature, and he has to break away and run not because they’re losing, but because he hates what he’s become.

Book!Jasper has no real chemistry with Alice. In the movie, their meeting has genuine charm and gentle humor to it. Jasper was miserable and despondent and was wandering lonely and lost and Alice brought hope back into his life.

Book!Jasper doesn’t care about humans, doesn’t even think of them as people, and only eats animals to keep Alice happy and compliant. In the movie it seems as though he didn’t even know they had the choice to eat animals before he met Alice, and the remaining parts about his attitudes towards humans were wisely cut.

In the books, during the newborn battle, he murders newborn vampires with pleasure. Remember, these are misguided vampires who have been lied to and trained by Victoria and Riley. They’re victims. But he enjoys killing them, and when they take Bree Tanner a prisoner, he hits her with Presence to try to get her to attach him and let him justify murdering her, and he tortures her by sitting her right next to the fire while he burns her friends and her lover.

The movies are smart, though, and cut all this. Not only that, but they improve on it…when Bree Tanner survives, she surrenders and they accept it. And when the Volturi show up, they try to protect Bree. When Jane says that Bree is going to die anyway, Jasper is angry by this and stands in front of her to shield her with his own body. All of the Cullens move to protect her, and only the presence of Jane and Alec forces them to turn her over.

In short the screen writers took a sadistic, evil psychopath who Meyer said was a hero and turned him into a sympathetic and humane character we could cheer for.

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Rosalie became kind of awesome.

In Eclipse, out of nowhere we learn that Rosalie wishes she wasn’t a vampire because she wants BABIES and is miserable because she can’t have BABIES and curses her wealth and beauty and power because she’ll never have a BABY. But Movie!Rosalie is low key and consistent, Her obsession with BABIES is gone. Bella makes a thoughtless comment about how awesome vampirism is, Rosalie get mad and storms off. Bella goes and asks her what her deal is, and Rosalie gives an abriged version of her story told very well through flashbacks. The rape and murder were filmed well and pushed the edge of the PG-13 rating. They toned down the moustache twirling rapists, and omitted the “oops” moment of the slaughtered innocent bodyguards. And finally, they took the BABIES fixation out. Movie!Rosalie doesn’t think she’s incomplete because she can’t have BABIES…she thinks her life was incomplete because she wants to be human, old and grey-haired, and sitting with Emmett on a porch watching their grandchildren play in the yard. She doesn’t want BABIES, she wants life and a family and humanit and motherhood and to bring a new generation to carry on into the future. It’s not an obsession with BABIES, but the tragic aspect of what vampires lose.

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Maria was actually Mexican.

There’s no nice way to say this. Meyer is casually racist in having skin tone and ethnicity removed by becoming vampires. Maria was a Mexican woman turned into a vampire and had all of her ethnicity taken by vampirism. And considering how often we hear that becoming a vampire involves having all of your flaws removed and thus you become the perfect being with unparalleled and universal beauty?

[url= http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications]Yeah.[/url]

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Both in book and movie, Edward:

1) Tampered with Bella’s car engine so she couldn’t drive to La Push

2) Kidnapped her and dragged her off to Florida without telling her why, keeping the truth from her even though she had every right to know about Victoria.

3) Forbade her from seeing Jacob because he’s “too dangerous” even though it’s because he’s a jealous racist.

4) Tried to force her into marriage.

5) Set Jacob to hear Bella declare her love for Edward and was going to marry him, knowing it would hurt Jacob.

But the difference is that Movie!Bella calls him out on this bullshit.

Every time he does something on that list she’s in his face, and calls him out on it, and goes out of her way to do the thing he tells her not to do in order to prove that she’s her own woman. Even the marriage was done better; he’s pushy about it and every time he’s an ass, she says no. When he simply asked, saying that he wanted to marry her because he loved her, she said yes, then. Holy shit. Movie!Bella is going to marry Movie!Edward because she loves him and he loves her and they want to be together. No pushing, no bribery.

So not only did the writers call out Edward, but they did it with Bella and gave her some backbone in the process.

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Rape is not cool.

Meyer seems to have missed that, because when Jacob mouth-kisses Bella in chapter fifteen he’s an asshole, blames her for breaking her hand on his face, accuses her of liking it, gloats to Charlie about it, and Charlie congratulates him and scolds Bella for not going along with it.

And none of that happened in the movie. But when they get back home, Edward is pissed. I’m bringing that up because he’s not pissed in the book. His attitude is basically, “I’ll kick your ass later, bro, but right now my chick’s here.” No, Movie!Edward gets in Jacob’s face, and there is legitimate rage there. He says, “If you hurt her again, I will kill you.”

Then BEST PART: Charlie comes out shortly after they start yelling. He wants to know what’s going on and breaks up the fight on his lawn. Jacob tells Charlie what he did. And Charlie looks like he can’t believe Jacob just said that. So yes—EVERYONE disapproves of what he did. Just as it should be.

And later, after the rape-kiss, when Jacob later shows up at the graduation party, he comes out and says he was wrong, he’s genuinely sorry, and that he was a dick. He offers the bracelet he made as a peace offering, not a symbol of ownership. So yes—everyone knows what he did was wrong, they tell him it was wrong, and Jacob acknowledges it was wrong. THANK YOU, MOVIE.

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We see the newborn army

The newborn army was a big deal in the story. It’s the focus of the plot, no matter how much she tries to ignore it in favor of love triangles. In the movie, we actually see it. The very first scene of the movie is Victoria hunting Riley before she turns him. It’s very well shot and has dramatic tension to it. We see Riley bringing Victoria victims to turn. We see the effort the two of them are putting into their plan. We see the horrible violence in Seattle. We also see Victoria and Riley interacting. Victoria manipulates and uses him and we see how firmly she has him by the balls, which is a great parallel to Jasper that Meyer utterly failed to exploit.

We see the newborns, what they are capable of, their violence and power. We see them coming. They are an established menace, not an off-screen bunch of people we hear about and never see. They are real, tangible villains that need to be put down.

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Division Within The Volturi

I really liked this change. In the book, it was obvious that Aro sent Jane and company down to put down the newborns too late on purpose because it was his decision to do so. They should have seen it, too, what with Alice’s visions. It’s a stupid plot hole brought on by Alice’s powers only working when convenient, not to mention stupid on Aro’s part because he wants to collect Alice and Edward, right? But he puts them in danger from a newborn army to pull off his plan.

But in the movie, it was Jane who made the decision to delay. Aro sent Jane to put down the newborns, but because she was jealous of Edward and Alice, she goes with her own agenda. She dawdles and deliberately lets the newborn problem escalate so that Aro won’t push her aside in favor of his new tors Edward and Alice. It makes wonderful sense.

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Fucking Action Scenes.

For some reason, Meyer is under the impression that readers don’t want to read about fight scenes between vampires and werewolves. Why read about that when you can read page after page of Edward and Bella sitting next to each other and touching faces? Or chapters comprised of endless monologues of bad history and melodrama?

In the books Meyer cops out of every single action scene. But just like in Twilight and New Moon, it was in the hands of screenwriters who knew what they were doing and we see action every time it’s only described in the text. There’s a chase scene between the Cullens and werewolves hunting Victoria, and her escape comes down to her skill rather than everyone else being stupid. We see the training the Cullens and werewolves do to prepare for the newborn army. We see the final fight. Everyone gets involved, including Esme Cullen, and we see the Cullens working alongside the werewolves, not just being racist to them and hearing Bella/Meyer tell us how much they suck.

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Bella saves the day.

Book!Bella is a useless protagonist. In the true fashion of a self-insert amateur writer, in the book she does nothing at all but is still the center of the book’s universe. All the action and other characters revolve around her. Eclipse is the worst offender in this regard. Despite the fact that James was the aggressor and it was Emmett and Jasper that killed James, Victoria blames Edward for James’ death and decides to get back at him by killing Bella.

But Movie!Bella is in a different situation. Not only did Edward kill James, making Victoria’s revenge plot more logical than the book version, but look at that picture up there. Riley and Victoria have Edward down. They are winning. Victoria is about to tear his head off. And Bella grabs a rock and slices her arm open, distracting Victoria and Riley, giving Edward a few extra seconds to fight and for help to arrive, thus effectively saving Edward’s life.

In other words, Bella saved Edward’s life. If she had not done that, he’d be dead. They both would. It was that time that let Seth sneak up on Riley and get him in a death-lock, and then Seth and Edward went two-on-one on Victoria. Bella turned the tide of battle in their favor. She saved the day.

There is one more reason why I like the Eclipse movie:

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Her name is Leah.

This is not a trick of the light. She really is that hot.

Leah is the only three-dimensional, realistic character with a legitimate story arc, development, motivation, and reader sympathy in the entire freaking series. She has REAL character flaws that are part of her character and things she works to overcome. And she is so amazingly wonderful that Meyer cannot bring her down. It’s not for lack of trying. Everyone shits on Leah constantly. And Meyer tries to make Leah into a non-person by the rules of the Twilight-universe because she can’t have children. Leah was destined to never find love because what use is love if you can’t make babies, right? That’s why Sam didn’t imprint on her—because she’s an infertile freak. Over and over again, Meyer tries to demonize her and make us hate her and sympathize with the main characters.

But she can’t bring Leah down. Everything she says is either completely sensible or worded in a way that makes us sympathize with her more. The main characters deserve her “bitchy” remarks. When she laments her infertility, it feels less like Rosalie’s BABIES! syndrome like “I was stripped of all my choice, and I feel like a freak.” And the reason she feels like a freak is that all the male werewolves treat her like a freak. Just like in the book, the demonizing of Leah just makes the protagonists and side characters look like cruel assholes. But Leah rises above it. She is awesome and I have no idea how Meyer created her.

The screenwriters of Eclipse apparently felt the same way. They cast an amazing actress to play Leah. She’s tough and sexy and nails the character. Then her introduction in the movie. She comes out, takes one look at Bella, and says GTO you horrible cocktease. I’m not joking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ87lunWMtc

And she keeps going like this through the entire movie. All her best character moments were beefed up and we didn’t have to wear Bella-filters from our POV, so we were shown what Meyer wrote without Bella/Edward/Jacob commenting on Leah being a bitch. They showed what was written and what was written was Leah being awesome.

The writers also show the way everyone treats her in canon; that is, in an appalling manner. The Bella is a cocktease scene is an example. Leah snaps at her and walks off, and then Emily comes bouncing out, all bubbly and huggy, and then sidles up to and attaches herself to Sam, and they both look over their shoulders and just smirk at Leah. This is not an exaggeration; this is a screen shot of that look they’re giving Leah. Tell me they’re not being smug assholes.

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The movie also uses framio show how she excluded by the pack, such as in this shot:

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The boys and the properly submissive woman are clustered together, but Leah is made to stand to one side, alone.

So not only does the movie show how awesome Leah is, but it shows how everyone else is a raging dick to She doesn’t deserve the treatment, she is sympathetic, she is awesome, and we hate everyone for how they treat her.

Leah Clearwater, bitches.