It was back in February 2010 when we learned that Summit had decided to split the final book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga into two films. At the time we knew that Harry Potter and The Hobbit were headed the same way, and the question was: Could any of them pull it off?

July 2011 rolled around and fans were impressed with Warner’s split of Deathly Hallows. Then all eyes shifted towards Breaking Dawn. Could they pull it off too?

The short answer is yes — for the fans. The film nicely accommodates several big moments in the first half of the book.

Edward and Bella’s wedding is a fun yet lengthy opening which sets the film off to a great start. All moments of your typical, dysfunctional family wedding are captured – from the father/daughter walk down the aisle to the toasts during the reception.

A special moment during the wedding is the cameo of author Stephenie Meyer while Bella is walking down the aisle. Meyer is a wedding guest and makes solid eye contact with her lead character for a couple of seconds. It’s a stunning moment because it seems surreal for an author to be staring at her character in real life.

The preceding honeymoon, while filled with fun, ended up running a bit too long. I found myself wanting this portion of the film to move on pretty quickly. The repeated cuts back to the chess scene, for example, were a nice reference to the book’s cover but needed only to be shown once for a split second.

The sex scene has a high level of anticipation and may be the single largest reason some fans are looking forward to this part of the story. You don’t see much (to the relief of parents and the MPAA).

Once Bella realizes she’s pregnant, the film loses its fun and switches to a much more dramatic story for the remainder. Bella’s looming birth/death stretched on for far too long and was another victim of the film being split into two. Like with Eclipse, I found myself very aware of the large amounts of dialogue and small amounts of progress or intriguing action.

The final big event in this film is of course the birth scene. I didn’t find it as crazy as it read in the book, and that’s probably a good thing.

In director Bill Condon’s version it played more realistically (yes, you heard me right) and the succeeding appearance of Renesmee worked great. The imprinting too is included in Part 1, and I was very glad to see that it didn’t give the impression that Jacob was a pedophile. Rather, the film only showed Jacob make eye contact with baby Renesmee very shortly before flashing forward into what was Jacob and Renesmee’s future long down the road. By doing this, the filmmakers told you that Jacob was imprinting on Renesmee because he saw their future romantic relationship – not one in the present.

Breaking Dawn – Part 1 had all of those climatic scenes and each stood on its own, but I still felt that the film didn’t need to be two hours. If it were cut down to 90 minutes it would have felt much stronger. This 2 hour length for Part 1 worries me as we look ahead now to Part 2. Interestingly Condon revealed earlier today he recently cut nearly 20 minutes from the film (which is reassuring).

Like all of the Twilight films, Breaking Dawn – Part 1 is a film for the fans. There’s no doubt that this will top the list for most of the loyal Twihards, and I’m not surprised that critically it has been doing poorly. Whether a critic or a fan, it’s important to remember that the serious box office draw of The Twilight Saga is very helpful to Hollywood in a time when film revenue is smaller than ever.

Grade: B+

Rated: PG-13 (For disturbing images, violence, sexuality/partial nudity and some thematic elements.)

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 opens nationwide November 18, 2011.