Upon a re-watch of the Twilight saga, the recasting of Victoria is an awkwardly handled plot point that derails the flow of the movie adaptations. The Twilight movie adaptations are by no means perfect. Despite Taylor Lautner’s insistence to the contrary, Twilight’s imprinting subplot is creepy and not particularly well justified by the movies, and the central love story between Bella and Edward isn’t substantial enough to sustain multiple movies (hence the frequent complaints from critics that the adaptations were lacking in incident).

However, one of the biggest problems with Twilight’s movie adaptations occurs in the two strongest movies of the series. While director Catherine Hardwicke’s original Twilight introduced a version of the villainous Victoria played by Rachelle Lefevre, 2010’s Eclipse recast this secondary villain with Bryce Dallas Howard. This results in Twilight’s sequel hook seeming like a non-sequitur upon a re-watch of the original movie,...