Movie Review: Twilight Saga: New Moon

Twilight made a very big splash when it came to theaters last year. Hoping to cash in before the craze subsides the studio roped in a new director to bring the second chapter of the much loved literary saga, New Moon, to the screen quickly. Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass) has a much different visual approach from Catherine Hardwicke who directed Twilight and he has far more experience with special effects. But did this change behind the camera yield anything other than the copy/paste from page to screen that audiences were given with Twilight? Simply put, no.

As New Moon opens Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is fast approaching her 18th birthday. This event has her very apprehensive as it will make her physically older than her perpetually 17 year old vampire love interest Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). When Bella suffers a minor cut while having a birthday party at the Cullen's home one of Edward's "brothers" attacks her. Edward fends off the hungry assault but it leads him to the decision that he needs to leave Bella. Since Bella has built her entire life around Edward this leaves her devastated, waking every night screaming at the top of her lungs. The only solace she finds is in reckless acts (which provide her with mental visions of Edward trying to stop her) and the company of her friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Bella starts to bond closely with Jacob but soon the 16 year old Native American has his own problems as he learns of his werewolf heritage. With werewolves being the mortal enemies of vampires this leaves Bella torn between her growing friendship with Jacob and her never waning need to have Edward back.

New Moon has a number of things going for it; primarily it simply looks better than Twilight did. Director Chris Weitz doesn't suffer from the same avoidance of color that Twilight's Catherine Hardwicke did and his experience in dealing with special effects shows as well. The werewolves are never really photo realistic as an effect but they never fail to be visually interesting. Actually Jacob and his werewolf friends as a group are just generally livelier than the mopey Cullen family was so it's a minor relief that Bella spends more of the film with them. However these few slight improvements are all completely sunk by the fact that New Moon has an even weaker story than Twilight did. Over the course of two hours very little actually happens. Edward has left before the first half hour is over and then it is a slow slog to the werewolf reveal about an hour of the way in (a delay made all the more painful by how much the wolves were shown in all the marketing of this film). There are a few bright spots of enjoyment, there's a wolf on wolf fight that is brief but exciting and the regal Volturi vampire lords have some great gravitas and tension. But the amount of nothing that has to be waded through to reach these brief points of enjoyment is staggering.

The crime of New Moon isn't that not much happens; it's that it takes forever for any of it to happen. The whole thing is just padded in a very odd way. There really aren't any extraneous scenes; every scene has a point and purpose for being there. But simply put nearly every scene goes on 1-2 minutes longer than is necessary to get its point across. For example there is a scene where the vampire villain Laurent from the first film makes a return and threatens Bella. Now this should have been a scene of high tension, and for a short time it even is. But then it just keeps going on and on, Laurent talking and talking and not actually doing anything. By the time something actually happens any tension the scene had is gone. This is pretty much every scene of the film in a nutshell. Scenes will make their point and then just keep going.

It's not just the lack of events that let New Moon down; the characters don't do it many favors either. It's not that the Twilight universe is totally devoid of interesting characters; rather it's that the story focuses on Bella (even more so than the last film) and Bella is just a supremely uninteresting character. Due to no fault of Kristen Stewart (though she seems to not be trying as hard this time around, perhaps she's given up) Bella simply has no personality of her own. She defines herself entirely by her relationships with men, specifically Edward and Jacob. Her world begins and ends with her connections to these two men and she's almost completely bereft of any personality traits that are independent of them. She spends the entire film moping after Edward and screaming in her sleep, it's a wonder that anybody wants to be around her or that her father doesn't simply call a shrink.

In the course of telling the story of this very uninteresting person book author Stephanie Meyer did occasionally stumble across interesting ideas but they seem to be included almost accidently. The sudden and violent transformation of the boys into wolves, the Volturi, and a vampire woman from the last film out for revenge all threaten to make the film interesting and maybe even entertaining. But these ideas don't seem to have caught Meyers' attention and so they just sort of graze by without leaving much lasting impact on the proceedings. The actors aside from Kristen Stewart are fairly inert for the most part. Pattinson's part isn't really much more than a glorified cameo and he's moping his way through it. Lautner at Jacob seems to be putting the most effort in, having put on a great deal of muscle for this film. Actually the degree to which his body (and those of his wolf brothers) is put on display and is sexualized is frankly disturbing given that the actor is 17 and the character is 16.

In many ways the Twilight films are falling victim to the same problems that plagued the first two Harry Potter films and this year's Watchmen. That is the makers are so fearful of angering the fans by leaving things out or changing them that they're not really adapting the material for film properly. Rather than look at the story and characters and try to make it work as well as it can on film they're opting to just try to be sure to do exactly what was on the page as much as possible. The result is checklist style filmmaking, being sure to not miss any scenes that might be fan favorites. However to be frank Harry Potter and Watchmen had better source material so while they may not have been fully adapted as films they still managed to hold up for the most part. New Moon just doesn't have enough going on, either in terms of events or characters, to keep any level of interest up except for the most diehard of fans.

Final Score: 1.5 out of 5