Twilight Saga: New Moon - 2009

The Twilight Saga: New Moon - 2009

The books may be bad but at least they don’t have Kristen Steward and Robert Pattinson.  The two Twilight leads have gained a lot of hate (as well as admiration I suppose) and I don’t want to jump on the band wagon but they’re just not very good.  Thankfully we don’t get much Pattinson in this movie.  He’s just in the movie long enough to spout exposition, dump Bella, create a conflict at the end of the movie, and immediately resolve it.  As simplistic as that summary is the movie is a little more complex, but not by much.

Here is a 2x4

Here is Kristen Stewart.  Can you tell the difference?

“New Moon” begins in the middle of an action sequence (that we don’t get to see until the end of the movie) that transitions into a nightmare about aging.  This is a recurring theme throughout this and later entries in the series.  Bella complaining that she is getting too old or is tired of being human and begging, extorting, or manipulating her vampric boyfriend into changing her.  It gets old fast.  Bella is still in high school and is all of 18 years old in this movie.  I don’t remember being that concerned with age at 18, 29 yes but 18 seems a bit young for a mid-life crisis.  Her friends and family are intent on chiding her about this by mocking her, giving her birthday presents, and a birthday party in spite of her many objections.

The Cullens hold a birthday party for her where she gives herself a paper cut on a present that creates a feeding frenzy.  Overacting to this Edward dumps Bella and leaves the country along with his family and this is where the movie starts to get really weird.  In the books Bella narrates in first person.  Who she’s relating these events to is unclear… I always figured they were journal entries but the format is a little too descriptive and impersonal than a diary entry.  They kept the first person narration in the first movie but in this one the narration takes place through emails to Edward’s sister Alice.  The efforts are for naught as the emails are being forwarded back to her from a deleted accounted.  I guess you could argue that the emails are therapeutic but I always wondered why she bothered.  I also wondered why the filmmakers decided to change the narrative format when it didn’t matter what format the narrative took.  Regardless as a result of her boyfriend leaving her she goes insane.  She starts having screaming nightmares and isolating herself from her friends.  Her father becomes concerned and she promises him she’s fine and to prove it she has movie night with her estranged friend.  Here’s something else I don’t understand, for months she’s abandoned her friends but as soon as she decides to reconnect they accept her as if nothing happened.   They don’t seem all that curious or concerned why she secluded herself but are willing to forgive her for it.  I should be so lucky to have friends like these.

Her psychosis continues as she approaches a group of bikers who reminds her of some thugs that were supposedly going to rape or kill her in the first movie.  Assuming that these are the same thugs I can’t imagine what she hoped to accomplish by confronting them.  IN MOVIES CHARACTERS HAVE TO HAVE MOTIVATIONS AND THAT HAVE TO MAKE SENSE!  Whatever the reason she hops on the back of one the bikes and is taken for a joy ride until the motorcycle reaches a certain speed and she hallucinates an image of Edward warning her to stop.  Just like in the book she becomes a junkie for these hallucinations.  So she gets a couple of bikes and reunites with yet another friend who of course accepts her without incident.  He also agrees to help her rebuild these bikes in secret and teach her how to ride them.

As they’re rebuilding the bikes a friendship blossoms through montage and Bella starts to forget about Edward.  All of a sudden halfway through the movie Jacob disappears and Bella becomes miserable again.  After several unsuccessful attempts to reach out to Jacob she visits his house only to be turned away.  Realizing she has nothing left to keep her sane she goes looking for the spot in the forest her and Edward used to… ummm sit and talk to one another?  It’s not clear exactly what they do there.  Normal teen couples would probably make out, have sex, get high, or drink but when they’re there they just chat at stare at each other.

While in the forest she comes across a vampire who threatens to kill her but just as he’s about to do so a pack of giant wolves comes out of nowhere and chases him away.  It is revealed not too much later that Jacob is a part of this pack and can morph into a wolf.  Later on Bella jumps off a cliff to force another hallucination and nearly drowns.  Unfortunately she’s saved and Alice the psychic Cullen sees this and comes rushing from wherever her and the rest of the Cullens have been hiding.  Through a misconception Edward believes Bella to be dead and decides to break vampire law to be killed by their governing body.  Bella finds this out through Alice and they go racing off to Italy to stop him.  Unfortunately they succeed but the vampire police? government? royalty? enforcers?, want to talk to them anyway.  Alice, Bella, and Edward are taken to a group of vampires called The Volturi that is led by one of the most manically flamboyant vampires you will ever see in a movie.  We find out that Bella for no reason at all is immune to vampire superpowers.  Believing Bella to be a threat they attempt to kill her and a fight breaks out between Edward and one of the bad guys.  At the moment Edward is about to be sacrificed Bella pleads to take his place.  This ruse works and the Volturi let them all go with the promise that they turn Bella into a vampire.  The movie ends and everyone lives happily forever or at least until the next movie.

Despite its obvious defects “New Moon” made some improvements from its predecessor and of course the book.  The soundtrack for one still sucks but it’s a little better, the colors aren’t as muted as they were in the first film, and the parallels to “Romeo & Juliet” are reduced to one mention as a book report.  On the flipside characters fashions, hairstyles, mannerisms, and accents change without rhyme or reason.  “New Moon” has only the thinnest plot and plays out like a really bad daytime soap.  If anything both movie and book remind me of a line from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, yeah sure “New Moon” is bad but it’s “mostly harmless”. 62/100