a momentary blight on good storytelling, vampires, and other things

Rating: 2/10 (24 November 2009)

Watching the sequel to Twilight, New Moon, is like looking into a dark, scary vortex. Not because the movie is scary or the director creates a compelling mood or the characters are particularly creepy (at least in the way intended). Heavens, no. It's the vortex of a cinematic nightmare of unintentional hilarity tinged with boredom, a romance movie with no touching romance, a horror movie with no horror, a love story without the love - or, rather, there is love, but it's the kind that speaks to a time before the feminist movement actually did things meaningful. And the characters have no concerns, nothing that interests them or makes them anything outside of their one-dimensional (if that) parameters, aside from the push-pull bond with Bella, and some kind of organization called the Voldroi or something. Even the aspect of 'vampires' and 'werewolves' becomes bunk. This is PG-13 non-sex nonsense porn of a high order.
The film picks up right where the first left off, a couple of months later and Bella and Edward are still together, dating and being all snug together, until at Bella's 18th birthday party she has a paper-cut and this sets off Edward's other hungry vampire relatives. So, because of this incident, he says he's leaving with the rest of the Cullen vampire family, without Bella. Why he does this entirely is made only by mild sense- mild being mumbling in the woods about "You're not good for me, I can't be near you, blah blah", and this, of course, sends Bella into a tailspin. For three months she just stares out her window doing nothing except moping and having screaming-dream fits. This changes when she reconnects with the local Indian guy with the six-pack abs (believe me, they're shown quite often), who, as it turns out, is a werewolf.
And other things happen too, like lots of "adrenaline junkie" scenes like Bella jumping off a cliff, and (badly) riding a motorcycle, and then a whole big preposterous climax in Rome where the vampire council is meeting and more things happen like fates decided and yada yada. In New Moon there's a new director for all of this, Chris Weitz, and unlike Catherine Hardwicke he doesn't put a light blue sheen over the movie but makes it look just regular-tinted... this is probably his only real positive contribution. It's not that his direction is of the completely mind-boggling or cine-vomit variety of Michael Bay. Albeit, I must note, that his skills at direction action set-pieces is atrocious (in that slow-FAST-slow-slow-FAST-slow motion makes me pine for Zack Snyder's 300) and his creative decisions with the camera like Bela's waiting for three months (the 360 camera spin with title cards saying the month in case *outside the window seasons change* didn't clarify it) or just the blurry appearances of Edward in front of Bela to give her advice when he's not there, are haphazard at best.
No, what makes this a badly directed film, most of all, is how he treats the script and his actors. This script, coming from a book by hack Stephanie Meyer, is just about the dumbest, mind-numbing and bloodless (no pun intended.. OK, some) from this year's lot of bad movies. Characters look and talk to each other without chemistry or anything that really makes them believable past their necessary stereotypes. Let's see; Bela: stuck-up and, to put it lightly, 'moody' girl with an obsession and without any direction aside from her crush; Edward: subtly (or just) psychologically abusive, without personality except for a crappy emo-kid imitation by Rob Pattinson; Jake: caring boyfriend-type whose face barely ever changes its expression, though a mullet was apparently harmed during the making of this movie. And the words given to them to speak ranges from hilariously stupid (so much so that you'll be laughing so much inside you may just cry) to painfully dull.
New Moon, unless you're already a die-hard with the books, or someone who takes in hackneyed romance seriously, is actually quite boring for much of the time. This, too, was a huge problem with the first Twilight film, and in this case it kind of sneaks up on you. Watching scenes go by, particularly in the mid-section when hairless boys aren't transforming in a nano-second into werewolves and having fights- where's Rick Baker when you need him (?) oh, wait, he got a call on the common sense train to not get anywhere near it- there isn't much going on in terms of a developing story or characters that grow at all. By the end of the film all we get is where things were at the start of the film, only with the teaser (spoiler) that Edward and Bela may get married (!) And it cuts to black just to get an audience full of helpless girls and older women clamoring for more.
The acting is stiff, the characters are depressive idiots and the craftsmanship from the cinematography to the music to everything else is bargain basement gussied up for a big-time blockbuster. There are two "teams" for this movie, and no I don't mean the "Team Jake" "Team Edward" teams, silly gooses. There's the team of people who go for this sleazy and demoralizing claptrap, and those who don't. Suffice to say, I don't. At all. Cuss this franchise!