Preview review: Wait, there’s another ‘Twilight: Eclipse’ trailer?

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As if a teaser and one full-length trailer weren’t enough to cause eager ‘Twilight’ fans to salivate, Summit Friday premiered yet another preview of the highly anticipated upcoming installment in the vampire series ‘Eclipse.’ On ‘Oprah,’ no less.

We’d heard the Web rumors that early test screenings of the film didn’t play well because many found the story to be too dark, leading to recent re-shoots. There’s no way to know how much truth there is to those rumors, but it certainly makes sense given this new footage, which seems pretty dark in its own right.

This go-round, there’s also a lot more dialogue and plot reveals. The trailer starts out with Jacob (Taylor Lautner) approaching Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) to ‘warn’ his love interest about something that ‘she has a right to know.’

Then, instead of Edward and Bella in the flower-filled field, we have a screaming Jacob [UPDATE: Or is it Riley? We can’t tell.] running down an ominous street in the rain before he gets cut, or maybe hit. We can’t tell, but it looks dark and unpleasant. There is general mayhem in the streets - burning cars, fistfights. What the heck is going on here? Again, for non-franchise die-hards, a lot of this stuff is confusing.

Apparently, someone is creating an ‘army of vampires,’ declares Peter Facinelli’s creepy-looking character, as he recruits Jacob and his gang of werewolves. What follows is a montage of action scenes accompanied by that intense kind of classical music. The whole trailer leads us to believe there’s going to be a lot more fighting than dreamy vampire-loving, which may bode a little better for the male fans the franchise is trying to hook -- but doesn’t bode quite as well for the women looking to get a glimpse of more Lautner and R-Patz shirtlessness.

And we’d be remiss not to mention the CGI here, which is difficult to tolerate even in the trailer. The wolves look so hokey and fake, and they’re made even worse by the slow motion.

-- Amy Kaufman (follow me on Twitter)

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