The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)
Grade:D
I was really tempted to give this no grade, actually. Because The Twilight Saga: New Moon is critic-proof. It doesn’t matter if I hated it, and frankly, I don’t even care that I hated it. It’s simply there, inert, a means to an end, a necessary step in the Twilight franchise, a film that was made to make a lot of money, and which will fulfill its purpose. On that front, the film is wildly successful. (Yes, I think I just gave the film credit for simply existing.)
The first shot of the film is perhaps the most telling. After the various logo cards, a shot of the moon womps its way on the screen. And then slowly wanes as “New Moon” appears behind it in the darkness. This shot is accompanied by frenzied ominous music and lasts for-freakin’-ever. It is so self-important, so over-the-top unnecessary and theatrical.
And it’s indicative of the rest of the film as a whole.
Those who have seen or read Twilight or have paid attention however briefly to pop culture in the last few years know that our protagonist is Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), eternally in love with vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), but in a struggle with her paramour between his desire for her to remain human and her desire to become a vampire so they can live together forever. Because Bella is apparently incapable of making a decision on her own or even knowing what’s best for herself, Edward says no, demanding that she remain human and enjoy a fulfilled normal life. After a birthday party with his family goes awry (one of his fellow vampires makes the teensy mistake of trying to eat her), he and the family decide to leave town for good, throwing Bella into a stupid pit of despair from which it seems she’ll never emerge.
Enter Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), longtime friend of the family, who assists Bella in her quest for adrenaline rushes. Seems visions of Edward pop up to further tell her what to do and what not to do whenever she’s getting an adrenaline rush from doing stupid shit, so what does she do? Stupid shit! Like enlisting Jacob to repair some motorcycles for her and then promptly crashing them, because she’s a klutz (this is something called a “character trait” and it apparently makes fictional people believable and three-dimensional). Mostly, though, Bella’s just an inert character to center a film on and beyond that, she’s dim, shallow, poorly-conceived, and depressing.
All of this doesn’t amount to anything, though. Like I said, it doesn’t matter one iota how good or bad the film is. It just has to exist, it has to follow the book so as not to disappoint fans and cause a backlash, and it has to open on as many screens as possible to shuttle audiences through as quickly as possible, which is more difficult with this film at a ludicrous runtime of 130 minutes.
Credit where credit is due: the actors do alright this time around. Stewart has the hardest role because Bella is such an idiot, and she manages to make Bella at least vaguely likable. Pattinson is barely in the film, and thank God, because his take on Edward is laughable. He simply is not an alluring character in the slightest. Among films where the only connection between the central love birds solely consists of their constant declarations that they love each other, it would help if the characters were likable in the slightest and Pattinson doesn’t do anything to help. Lautner fares the best of the central three, partly because he is the only one playing a character with some semblance of a personality. Catherine Hardwicke’s good casting from the first film helps with the secondary characters in this installment: Nikki Reed in particular has one big moment as Edward’s vampire “sister” Rosalee and she is the only person to effectively convey the turmoil a vampire must go through in the world of the film. She accomplishes in three lines what Pattinson’s entire role over four hours of finished film has set out to do.
Anna Kendrick, as Bella’s friend Jessica, is in a completely different stratosphere of a league than her co-stars. Plain and simple. She has maybe four or five minutes of screen time, and she milks every damn line for a laugh and infuses Jessica with so much personality that you nearly wish she had been cast as Bella in the first place. She’ll likely score an Oscar nod this year for Up in the Air, a film that I haven’t seen yet but can guarantee will be better than this. She’s slumming it here and I can’t wait to see her in a more substantial role and part.
Lastly, Dakota Fanning and Michael Sheen class up the joint at the end of the film as evil vampire overlord… things that form the Volturri, a counsel of vampires that I think rules over the vampire world? Specifics were fuzzy or maybe I wasn’t paying attention because I was so bored. Whatever. Anyway: Fanning literally has four or five lines, and she fares pretty well, but Sheen hams up his role and nearly makes the Volturri’s decision at the climax of the film make sense. He isn’t helped at all by the screenplay, but damn if he doesn’t make the evil vampires kinda fun instead of dreadfully self-important.
Technically, things are more even-handed this time around than with Twilight, but the intent of the first film was more on point. Director Chris Weitz has hired accomplished technicians to capture gorgeous shots, but it doesn’t quite mesh with what the films are supposed to represent for its target audience. The moody blues and washed out images better matched gloomy Forks, Washington than the rich earth tones do here; more than this, though, the pale vampires this time around look pretty goofy when the images aren’t washed out themselves. The effects are top-notch, though. Werewolves factor heavily in this installment, and Weitz’s experience with the vastly superior The Golden Compass pays off here: the CG wolves are seamlessly integrated into the world of the film when they could have easily been yet another lame and goofy element of the world.
Really, the only thing the film has going against it is that it’s based on Stephenie Meyer’s book. Not to harp on Meyer, because clearly she’s tapped something in her target audience, but having read the books, she simply has not proven herself adept at world building (just think of how complex and thorough J.K. Rowling was with the Harry Potter universe). More than that, though, she has created characters that are two-dimensional at best. These characters are wish-fulfillment ciphers, and as such, there just isn’t anything to build a two-hour-plus film around. Those of us who don’t get swept up in a broad strokes love story are thus left with nothing to do but laugh at how seriously everyone is taking themselves.
Bottom Line:
It’s a terrible, terrible film. Devoid of plot, interesting characters, or any other basic necessities a film needs, New Moon is successful only as a near-direct transfer of the book to the screen. As the book was a train wreck, the film is dead on arrival.
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted November 23, 2009. IMDB