Now, I actually quite liked Twilight. It was a deeply mediocre film, but I was expecting a dire one, so was pleasantly surprised that, for me, it just staggered over the line separating good from bad. It was a slow-burning love story about an ordinary girl falling for a rather uninteresting but handsome vampire who I could just about accept was eternally 17 rather than an old man. A contrived, lazily-plotted and open-ended climax in which a very artificial problem was set up followed, which could have been sorted out far more easily than it was, but the pacing carried it through. Besides, I had something of a fondness for the cast, as Bella was played by Kristen Stewart, who was so adorable in Panic Room that I actually put myself through Catch That Kid, although thought it would doom her career (instead it’ll likely come back to haunt it), and tickled by the fact that Shark Boy Taylor Lautner made an appearance.
So I was actually open to New Moon. I know that Stephanie Meyer is a terrible, terrible writer. I know that the first film succeeded on style and had no substance at all. But hey, werewolves are cool, and Lautner’s role had expanded.
However, while New Moon in summary works far better than Twilight, and at its best is far better than anything in its predecessor, this is not a good film. In fact, it’s pretty horrible – badly written, performed and produced.
Bella, loving Edward as Juliet loved Romeo (a comparison driven home with a sledgehammer), wants to become a vampire. Fair enough. They’ve got awesome powers and live forever. Edward won’t let her be one, for horribly flimsy reasons such as her immortal soul. When one of the Cullens almost harms the weak human, the whole clan has a hissy fit, leaving town. Edward unconvincingly dumps his dearest love, it never occurring to him that the other vampires from the last film can easily kill her. Luckily, they are oh-so-coincidentally not the only monsters in town.
The film swings wildly between interesting character development and horrible boredom. For every scene where you think Jacob is a well-written, likeable and interesting character, you get the awful tedium of stupid dreams, hallucinations, depression and graceless directorial decisions that make you roll your eyes, like a cut between thrown pizza slice and caught wrench, or a horrible show-off shot where a camera circles, showing a different month outside a window with every pass. Clever, but this isn’t a film for the director to show off like this, especially sapping pace.
Bella is much, much less likeable here, too. In the first film, there was the irksome suggestion that everyone loves her by default, being gorgeous and sassy yet also still bookish and rude, but overall I didn’t hate her. I do now. She never apologises, even after slapping someone without good reason, or falsely accusing a person of murder. An awful Mary Sue power is given to her for no reason (at least Gakuen Alice is cute enough to carry off an identical conceit and contextualises it better), even though it contradicts an earlier scene were Jasper affects her mood. And the Cullens look stupid in this film, like they fell over face-first in a baker’s and got smacked about with the rolling pins.
There’s more awful lazy plotting with motives given by psychic powers, and it’s unforgivable how an interesting relationship is just totally abandoned, how it turns out that the major antagonist, Victoria, ends up doing nothing in the film but running about and sometimes floating. Edward wants to kill himself, and presumably he can’t just get werewolves to rip him apart because of inexplicable treaties, so goes to the powerful Volturi. If he wanted to die, he could’ve just slapped one of ’em, but no, he has to be a drama queen with a ridiculous plan that would surely make more people think he was an angel than a vampire. Afterwards it seems like the elder vampires would have spared him anyway. I quite like the Volturi, though, pasty and sinister and in one case, rumbly. Impressive imagery here.
But Meyer’s world just seems so poorly-thought-through. As with so many long-lived creatures in badly-conceived novels, it seems nothing interesting happens to any vampires until Bella arrives. Vampires and werewolves would clearly have full-scale wars and there’s never any good reason for either group to hide themselves. The Cullen world view would obviously have asserted itself many centuries before, and vampires would just feed on animals.
In the end, then, the most enjoyable thing about seeing New Moon is getting to read Dan Bergstein’s wonderfully sarcastic, silly blog he wrote as he read it, which also lets me see some of Meyer’s howlers that didn’t make it to the film, like offering an Italian a bribe of a $1,000 bill (Lira? 50p?) or a powerful vampire whose ability is to…see relationships. He had some problems I didn’t, for example, I thought the Volturi were influential enough that if the Cullens tried to do anything to save innocent tourists, a whole lot more people other than Edward and Alice would suffer (that said, the film didn’t have Bella getting all lovey-dovey right outside the door) but the man is hilarious.
Really, though, the major crime of this film is building up a plot with Jacob and then just dropping it for a far, far less interesting, rushed and illogical story about Edward. Why anyone would think that Edward is appealing after all his lying, whining, neglect, smugness and hypocritical recourse to violence I do not get. Jacob, on the other hand, despite hinted-at anger management issues, is a good person. Stuck in an imagined world full of insufferable morons.
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