Weird lessons, shirtless dudes

Rating: 2/10 (20 November 2010)

Stephanie Meyer's Mormon tale of self-denial continues its filmic adaptation series with The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere, you know that Meyer's books were huge hits among the tween-teen girl set and that the movie series was destined to become a huge hit as well. Twilight was released in 2008 and the tepid vampire nonsense continues with New Moon.
All your pals are here for the fun, but there's a different director behind the camera if anybody notices. Chris Weitz, who directed The Golden Compass, is in charge of making the continuation of Bella and Edward's romance fly with its target audience. There is literally no attempt to reach beyond the target audience here, either.
Kristen Stewart is back as Bella Swan, the long-suffering, selfish brat living in Forks with her father. She is still in love with Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the vampire, and is concerned that she's going to grow into an old woman and Edward won't want her anymore. Of course, Edward is perpetually 17 and this bothers the now-18-year-old Bella. The Cullen family elects to throw her a birthday party and it is revealed that Bella may be more in danger than originally realized.
The Cullens decide to leave Forks and this sends Bella into a fit of insanity and weird behaviour. She starts hanging around Jacob (Taylor Lautner) and they develop their friendship and toy with the idea of romance. Soon, though, it is discovered that there is more to Jacob than meets the eye and beneath his buff exterior lies somethingwell, fluffy. Through a series of events and a little Romeo and Juliet twist, Bella and Edward are finally reunited in time for a crucial question.
There are so many basic problems with Meyer's entire series that it really leaves the film adaptations with no chance right out of the gate. Granted, a decent cast and a better script could make something out of the limp narrative and awful construction of the Twilight series, but most of this stuff was doomed from the start.
For starters, Bella is one of the most self-absorbed and repugnant characters in recent memory and she is touted as a veritable heroine. She isn't the least bit aware of the way she uses almost every character in the picture, either, and this is worsened when one realizes that she is incessantly drawn to men who are destined to abuse her. This concept is lightly brushed off as a byproduct of being with a "werewolf" or a "vampire," but a deeper look reveals something quite sinister in the overall message.
New Moon finds Stewart's Bella asking Edward to take her soul. This is an interesting conception when one considers what's really on the line here. For Bella and Edward's epic romance to mean anything on a large scale, something must be on the line. Of course, Meyer and Co. realize that there is nothing to draw these characters together so the mythos must draw us (the audience) in instead. That leaves us with hollow posturing and showiness that the actors are only more than willing to portray insipidly.
See, Stewart and Pattinson and Lautner simply cannot make this stuff interesting because it means nothing to them. The idea that Bella is drawn into abusive relationships with men is ignored in favour of this great love; the notion that Edward and Jacob will hurt her physically is brushed aside because the "love story" should be the focus. Indeed, nothing about the "love" Bella feels is presented as dangerous. What is presented as dangerous is riding on motorcycles or cliff-jumping.
As a film, New Moon is incredibly dull, hollow and absurd. The effects are meaningless and crappy, the rare action sequences cut off just at the point of interest, the romantic angles mean absolutely nothing, and the inferences of Mormon moralizing are flat-out vile. Weitz pulls the movie deeper into the sludge, giving us characters who are reprehensible and, on top of it all, bland in their declarations of emotion to one another.
The goal, however, isn't for people to actually consider how bizarre and obscene the messages are here ('tis better to fall in love with a man who puts you in perpetual danger than it is to try independence and ride motorcycles). Instead, Weitz and everyone else involved with this turd have ensured that the audience is far too busy concentrating on the shirtless eye candy and inane attempts at tension and "humour" that take place here. And the scary thing is, for the most part, it seems to be working.