You might have noticed that it was over a year ago that I reviewed the first and third parts of the Twilight soap opera, err … saga, but not this one. That isn’t by accident nor is it entirely due to my extreme laziness. As much as I kind of liked Eclipse and was sort of okay with Twilight, this movie did absolutely nothing for me to the extent that I wished to rewatch and review it. Yet, the gap in reviews for the series has constantly bugged me and with a forthcoming review for the newest installment (hopefully not by myself), I figured I would suffer for the loyal fan or two that we still have and watch New Moon. And I hate myself for it.
Look, I know that the first movie was nothing great or special to the population at large (excepting certain groups of course). The dialogue is trite, the acting is not very good (or downright horrid, K-Stew!), and it is merely an inconsequential teenage love affair that happens to feature “vampires.” Yet, even with all of that going against it, Twilight is probably close to ranking as a guilty pleasure just because I love the cinematography and the music. Oh, and Billy Burke. He’s pretty awesome too. Yet, the producers of New Moon seemed to extract from my dreams what I liked about the first and exclude those from this film because … hey, this isn’t a series for me.
The stupid teenage angst is still front-and-center with the awkwardly non-descript Bella (Kristen Stewart) smitten with her “vampire” beau Edward (Robert Pattinson) to the detriment of everyone else in her life. On her birthday, she attends a celebration of sorts at the Cullens’ which threatens to turn interesting after she gets a papercut and blood-thirsty Jasper lunges after her. Sadly, he does not succeed and Bella is still breathing afterwards. In turn, Edward decides that she is in danger around them and the vampire clan move off to sunny southern California or wherever leaving her behind. She fills the Edward-shaped void in her life with Jacob (Taylor Lautner) since he’s around, young, naive, and has a pretty nice six-pack if I do say so.
Imagine Bella’s heartbreak (!) when Jacob abandons her to run around half-naked with a bunch of other guys in the woods. I mean, it’s not like she’s bothered to cultivate any other emotional connections with anyone else other than a vampire and a shape-shifting wolf boy. So anyways, Jacob alludes to Edward that Bella is dead to which the distraught Edward decides to out himself as a vampire to provoke some the Godfather mafia of the vampire world. Oh, and there’s a few fleeting scenes of Victoria coming back to Forks to kill Bella but that makes up no more than ten minutes or so of this unbearably long film.
Replacing Catherine Hardwicke in the director’s chair this go-around is Chris Weitz, who is competent enough but has nowhere near the skill to make me remotely care about these stock characters and asinine situations. Or at least, he has nothing to distract me from them. Even worse though is the script from Melissa Rosenberg, who I can’t really fault based on the source material, because … nothing freakin’ happens other than Bella being a tease to Jacob and pouting over Edward. You could say the same thing about the first in which the main threat didn’t meet the core cast until the final twenty minutes or so but at least there was a threat. As I mentioned, Victoria and the other guy appear but their appearances are very brief and never really consequential to the story. Instead, we are treated to Bella acting like a damn fool just to have hallucinations of Edward saying “Bitch, please!” or something. And don’t get me started on the lazy and completely inept narration as Bella emails Alice at a non-functional address as a poor attempt to give her any sort of depth.
The final act if you can call it that is nothing more than the movie trying to interject some sense of tension or tragedy into the story. It’s sad that I don’t really care if Edward kills himself or Bella dies so that didn’t really register and it served more as (from what I hear) set up for following stories than anything noteworthy here. It was quite funny though when head vampy Aro (Michael Sheen) looks into Bella’s thoughts and remarks “I see nothing” since it perfectly describes Bella as a character who is defined only by whoever she happens to be around at the time. K-Stew’s performance doesn’t help as she’s just as frustratingly bad as the first film. I’ve seen Adventureland at least and know that she is capable of more but this character isn’t helping her portfolio. Pattinson is barely in the movie and Lautner swings from bad to decent pretty easily. And there is a severe lack of both Billy Burke and Anna Kendrick this time around so no acting points for you movie!
As I said, pretty much anything that I could give faint praise to the first film for has been left out here. Other than Bella and Jacob’s bonding sessions and the revelation that Jacob’s crew are werewolf-things, there is nothing necessary in this story. The Cullens leave town but return before the end, Edward ditches Bella but then asks her to marry him in the final seconds, and Victoria is still out for Bella’s blood when it’s all said and done. If you were to watch just the first and third films, there would be very little questions or confusion because this film is so useless. I can’t quite give it the crap category solely for the fact that my crap-o-meter is probably out of whack still from Halloween: Resurrection but this is easily the worst film in the franchise thus far. That should be damning enough.
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