How The Twilight Saga Wasted Alec’s Powers
While the Volturi guard Alec had some of the most threatening powers in the Twilight saga, the movie adaptations wasted his supernatural abilities.
While Alec should be one of the scariest villains in the Twilight saga, the movie adaptations of the best-selling novels never delved deep enough into his disturbing powers. Twilight’s movies may have been incredibly accurate to the source novels, but the screen adaptations of the saga still inevitably needed to cut some details from the original novels for the sake of maintaining a reasonable runtime. Since many viewers were mostly interested in the love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob, often, the Twilight movies cut elements such as villain backstories and other tangential information.
While Eclipse improved Twilight’s original third book plot by changing the role of Victoria, the story’s villain, 2009’s New Moon was not quite so fortunate. Sticking closely to the source novel’s story, New Moon was a drab sequel that mostly focused on Edward abandoning Bella for reasons that wouldn’t be explained entirely until the movie’s final scene. Often singled out as the weakest movie in the series by fans and critics alike, New Moon focuses on Bella, Jacob, and Edward so much that the sequel completely sidelined its ostensible villains. This was a shame, as one of them was among the Twilight franchise’s most threatening antagonists.
The Twilight Movies Never Showed The Effects Of Alec’s Powers
Cameron Bright’s Alec is, alongside his sister Jane, one of the Volturi’s highest-ranking guards. The Twilight adaptations never properly explain his vampiric superpowers but, unlike many members of the Cullen clan, Alec possesses lethally dangerous supernatural abilities. According to the saga’s source novels, Alec can deprive his victims of their senses, leaving them vulnerable to capture. His powers work on both vampires and humans, which made him a helpful ally to the Volturi. In a particularly brutal twist, Alec’s powers don’t stop his victims from feeling emotions like fear, even though they are unable to do anything about their predicament when the villain effectively leaves them completely defenseless.
The true extent of Alec’s powers is never portrayed onscreen in New Moon, although characters do speak in hushed tones about how dangerous he and Jane are. This might be due to the limited runtime of the sequel, but it does mean that one of the Twilight franchise’s most unsettling villains loses a lot of his potential impact. Much like Twilight’s deleted scenes depicting Bella conversing with her friends, this cut story element will have fleshed out the story of New Moon further and gives fans of the franchise more reason to worry about the fate of Bella and Edward.
Why Showing Alec’s Full Powers Would Have Helped The Twilight Saga
While Edward warns Bella to be wary of Alec and Jane, viewers never see the effects of their threatening powers in action. In particular, depicting Alec’s powers could have injected some real threats into the largely family-friendly Twilight saga’s story. The idea of a person losing their senses and being left at the mercy of powerful vampires without sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste for protection is scary without being inherently gory, which would have been perfect for the Twilight movies. Unfortunately, New Moon became the weakest Twilight movie by ignoring this power and focusing on its romance alone, depriving Twilight viewers of something truly chilling as a result.
