A never-ending stream of awkward moments

Rating: 3/10 (20 November 2009)

I will preface this review by saying that I have not read any of the twilight books, but I did watch the first movie before going to see this film, and I am looking at the series purely from a cinematic stand-point.
That being said, I thought this movie was a massive failure. The entire movie was very slow, long, and awkward. As I was watching it, it really felt like I was just watching a very long book unfold on screen, rather than a movie that is BASED on a book. To die-hard fans of the book, this could be considered a good thing, because all the fans really wanted to see was a movie that depicted all of the events of the book and followed it closely. By what I heard from book fans it seemed to have succeeded in that regard, but that is not at all to the film's credit. The film just moved from one scene to the next as if it was counting off a large check-list of scenes that the fans wanted to see, most of which just consisted of very uncomfortable and boring one-on-one dialogues. The film had very little momentum, and was tedious to watch. This was mostly due to the structure and pacing of the film but also due to the characters.
To be fair, some of the characters were likable, but they had very little chemistry. I already didn't quite believe Bella and Edward were in love in the first twilight. In this one I would flat out argue with Stephenie Meyer herself that the two characters were not in love. Their relationship was stiff, there seemed to be no real emotions between them, it merely consisted of silence, staring, and Edward randomly throwing out gooey love phrases like "you are my everything" and "i didn't wanna live in a world where you didn't exist" that just come out sounding hollow. There was a little more chemistry between Bella and Jacob, but even they were a bit awkward together. It seemed like none of the characters could say two words to each other without a ton of awkward pauses. The conversations were incoherent and annoying. There was a little bit of humor in the dialogue that I admit got some chuckles out of me, but even that came out of the awkwardness between all of the characters.
There were, however, a few welcome releases from the snail-like dialogue. Cinematically it had a few semi-redeeming moments. The score was likable, and a couple of scenes were artistically shot, but even so it was nothing that would deserve a best cinematography or best director nomination. The other well-needed break from the awkwardness came in the action scenes. They were very few and far between, and rather incoherent with the rest of the film, but they were enjoyable. The wolves were obviously CG in a lot of shots, but then there were some shots where they actually looked pretty real, and they were presented pretty well. They could have done a bit better job of foreshadowing them but hey at this point in the movie i was willing to accept what I could get. There was also a more intense scene near the end that I won't spoil that I thought was fairly well-done.
All in all, I did enjoy a few scenes in this movie, but as a whole it was slow, incoherent, poorly acted, and a bit uncomfortable. If you're a die-hard fan of the book, there's a chance you'll love it but if you're looking for a truly cinematic experience, this isn't it.
3 stars out of 10