The teenage supernatural melodrama “New Moon” made us feel like we were back in high school. Frustrated, bored, and more than a little angsty, we haven’t rolled our eyes this much since we were adolescents ourselves. Chris Weitz’s take on Stephenie Meyer’s second novel in the “Twilight series” may be marginally better than the first film, but it’s still a movie filled with groan-inducing dialogue, awful characters, and sub-par special effects.
“New Moon” doesn’t take any time in establishing the fact that its male leads — Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner — are supposed to be sexy. As Edward Cullen, Pattinson walks towards the camera in slow motion in one of the film’s first scenes with a shot that would make the “Baywatch” cinematographers proud. And Kristen Stewart’s Bella can’t stop looking at — and touching — Jacob’s (Lautner) newly muscled torso. In an industry that normally obsesses over female beauty and nudity, it’s nice to see the tables turned, but it’s not enough to distract us from the awful story that makes “True Blood” look like “Wuthering Heights” in comparison.
The film begins with Bella’s senior year and a birthday party that goes horribly wrong. Bella’s celebrated klutziness draws blood at the home of Forks’ resident vampires, the Cullens. Her brooding beau, Edward, realizes that he and his family can only bring harm to Bella, despite their good intentions, and they skip town, leaving Bella to wallow in her misery in the woods. In fact, that’s pretty much all Bella does in “New Moon,” with only the location of her wallowing changing. She trudges through her high school days, ignores her friends in the cafeteria, and slumps in her chair at home, looking out the window in sadness. Sigh.
However, she realizes that spending time with her friend Jacob eases her pain, even though Jacob harbors a major secret (and a crush on Bella). Soon, Bella finds herself having to choose between an absent vampire and a very present werewolf (ha ha ha ha). She may find comfort in Jacob’s friendship, but it’s not enough to calm her daredevil streak. Every time she tries something dangerous — hanging out with a biker she’s never met before, speeding on a newly restored motorcycle, or cliff-diving — Bella sees a cloudlike Edward urging her to be careful, and she’s willing to risk her life just to see her visions of him. Meanwhile, her everyday life brings enough danger since the vampire Victoria (Rachel Lefevre) is eager to make a meal out of Bella to get revenge for Edward’s role in her mate’s death.
“New Moon” will likely appeal to its rabid fan base, but nonbelievers will be as likely to appreciate the film’s, umm, merits as an atheist at a Pentecostal revival. The special effects are an improvement on its predecessor’s visuals, but the werewolves in particular don’t look up to the standards of a film that will easily make hundreds of millions of dollars.
The blame for the film’s faults shouldn’t rest solely on Weitz’s shoulders, but this was another poor choice for the director (who is not quitting film, apparently). “About a Boy” was definitely a career high for the “American Pie” filmmaker, and “New Moon” and “The Golden Compass” are new lows. Fantasy doesn’t seem to be his strong point, regardless of the strength or weakness of the source material. And since we’re not ones to insult Philip Pullman, we’ve got to take on “Twilight.” The dialogue in the books and the film seems like it was written by a not-particularly-intelligent teenager who spends her time shopping at Hot Topic and swooning over a boy. Melissa Rosenberg’s script doesn’t seem to diverge much from the sacred scripture of the novel, other than distilling 608 pages into a 130-minute film, which is good for the film’s fans and bad for everyone with a sense of taste.
One of the film’s improvements is the near-lack of Edward and, by extension, Pattinson. Edward calls himself “soulless” throughout the film, and Pattinson gives an emotionally dead performance that is draining to watch. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Pattinson joked (maybe?), “I sound so stupid, but in a lot of ways the hair is 75 percent of my performance.” Yes, you do sound stupid, but we don’t doubt that your hair–and your hair products–dominates your oh-so-emotional turn. Lautner is fine in his role as Jacob, but his abs seem to be his equivalent of Pattinson’s hair. Stewart has been strong in other roles, but she seems dragged down by the material here.
Anna Kendrick (who is rumored to have smartly dumped the film’s script in the trash) is deliciously shallow as Bella’s “normal” friend, and she even earned our only laughs that weren’t actually at the film. Michael Sheen seems to enjoy bouncing from high art (“The Queen”) to low (“Underworld”), and his “New Moon” role as a high-ranking vampire fits well with that strategy. In a small part, Dakota Fanning sheds her usual good-girl persona to play a sadistic blood sucker, and she ends up giving the film’s most interesting performance. She’s always seemed like a precocious, slightly creepy child in her other roles, so playing a wiser-than-her-apparent-years vampire works surprisingly well.
We’re the first to admit that we’re not the target audience for “New Moon” (you know, because we have taste and aren’t swooning teenage girls). But there’s playing to your base, and there’s making a bad film, and this is more a case of the latter. Even teenage girls (who have previously been responsible for the success of Hanson and “Saved by the Bell”) are too smart for this movie. And if they’re not, we’re in trouble as a species. [D]
