B-Movie Review: Twilight: New Moon

As if to pour salt in the wound, I decided that The Twilight Saga held enough fodder for me to do a whole series focused on these big screen disasters.  So onward I marched, to view Twilight: New Moon, the second in the franchise, with no thought of my mental health in mind.  Read on and enjoy… if you dare.

This time around, it looks like poor Bella has to lose her vampy boyfriend.  His presence puts her in danger (a pretty common failing of vampires, putting everyone around them in danger), so in order to protect her from both himself and the vampy things that go along with his vampy lifestyle, he and his family take off.

Naturally, Bella goes into a deep depression because she just can’t live without him.  Eventually, she discovers that if she puts herself in danger, Edward shows up in some sort of ghost form to tell her to stop doing whatever it is that she happens to be doing.  So in order to repeatedly hear her former boyfriend tell her to stop doing crazy shit, she starts living life on the edge.

But wait, there’s more!  Turns out that the girlfriend of the vampire guy Edward killed in the last film wants revenge, so she’s going to take it out on Bella.  And with Edward nowhere to be found, it seems as if she’s dead meat.  Thank goodness that there’s another burly young lad there to save her from harm.

Yes, Bella finds a new supernatural, werewolf buddy in the form of Jacob Black.  While she insists that they just be friends, Jacob is all about getting a little Bella action.  She subsequently tells him to his face that she wants him to hang around and act like he wants her but that she actually wants Edward so it will never happen.  But still, he should stick around anyways.  So Jacob says okay to that bizarre situation and manages to be around when the bad vamps come to get her.

Of course, we can only go so long without Edward, so back comes his vampy family to once again save Bella from harm.  But complications happen and Edward ends up believing that Bella is dead and that it’s all his fault.  So he removes his shirt and makes to walk into the sunlight during the middle of an anti-vampire parade so that the vampire police will kill him and put him out of our… er, I mean “his” misery.

Again, the movie suffers from similar flaws as the first.  The acting is like watching paint dry, the directing and editing half-assed and hackish.  Even when the movie gets inspired to take a shot at a vampire vs. werewolf battle, they use up their bag of tricks in the first minute and then prolong the thing, sans creativity, for another two or three just to drive the point home.

And, of course, Bella displays her usual lack of identity throughout.  At first she whines and cries because she’s going to get ugly.  She wants Edward to change her not so she can spend eternity with him, but because she thinks that if she ages another year he’ll consider her repulsive and wander off in search of another young lady to abuse.  The very fact that she doesn’t stop bugging him seems more like the reason that Edward leaves than any fear of putting her in danger.  I mean, a guy can only take so much nagging, right?

But the ladies may find some of the movie interesting, even without the prerequisite talent of the cast and crew.  For young, hunky Jacob and his pack of “barely legal” werewolf buddies spend most of the movie running around in shorts with no shirts on.  Naturally, they’re all sculpted to juicy buffness so that mothers and daughters can enjoy the film together with a little eye candy.

While I couldn’t say that the second was worse than the first, it certainly wasn’t much of a film.  Rotten Tomatoes shows a skewed rating on this one just like with the first, critics giving it 27% and audiences a more generous 65%.  I did, however, discover that if I watch the movie while really tired, so that my brain is working very slowly, it runs at about the proper pacing instead of feeling incredibly drawn out.  So live and learn, right?

Photo Credits -           

New Moon courtesy of twilightguide.com