Chris Weitz To Direct Next Twilight Film… Reactions Uncertain

Written on December 22, 2008 by Marc Eastman in Movies, Newsish

The news has been flying around that Chris Weitz has been tapped to direct New Moon, the second film in the Twilight franchise, and the idea has spawned more comment and reaction than any such news in quite a while.

Who directs what is usually good for a short paragraph at best, and that’s when anyone bothers to say anything at all. Perhaps just jumping on as a result of Twilight‘s box-office showing, a lot of people seem very interested in dropping their two cents on the idea… sometimes upwards of half a dollar. It may not have to do with Twilight itself, but the Weitz-Twilight combination, and the apparently strange fit.

Most recently popping up on my radar, Film.com’s Dre Rivas wondered aloud about Weitz putting his mark on the film. His take on the idea stemmed largely from his view of The Golden Compass, and his belief that Weitz hammered an exciting adventure into boring mediocrity. Beyond Mr. Rivas’ opinion of things, the overall mood of the news seems less than positive.

I’m taking it upon myself to not only defend Weitz as director of New Moon, but as director of The Golden Compass as well. And, while Mr. Rivas hopes for the director of About a Boy and fears the director of The Golden Compass, I’ll also take on supporting them both as model choices for the Twilight series.

First, the general sensibilities to be found in About a Boy are, I believe, surprisingly closely aligned with the general effort of the Twilight series. (Catch my Twilight review) It’s not a franchise that is especially fantasy, adventure, or even vampire. It’s a franchise based on character study, and is, one might say, accidentally about vampires. It is just the sort of story one might compare to trying to get into the minds of oddball characters who turn out to be more normal than anyone suspected… which is a good synopsis of About a Boy. The special note here is that About a Boy is simply a great movie, and it has a superb script, and solid actors… but, I think, there is no arguing that it is directed almost to perfection.

Maybe…, but what about The Golden Compass?

Quite frankly, I have to answer, “What about it?”

Was it the next greatest movie ever? Not even close. It was rather bogged down trying to fit too much of a far-reaching, multi-faceted story into one film. It wasn’t particularly good in a number of ways. I can even stand behind the idea that it was somehow a bit boring. But, let’s look at that complaint real quick. I put it to you that every little piece of every movie which is actually trying to develop the story, or dissect its characters, is by definition pretty boring… depending on how you look at boring. Mr. Rivas talks about a story with really cool witches, people from a parallel universe who have demons running around with them, etc., and somehow the film was made boring. Point taken actually, but the implication is something along the lines of… “more cool effects! more kicking ass!”

As I say, The Golden Compass is not a great movie, though it is rather servicable in my opinion. It isn’t bad. It just isn’t especially good. Where I think it fails is mostly in its delusions of grandeur, thinking that it can have everything and relay all of a novel which takes place largely within the characters’ thoughts. It tries to manage too much by focusing almost exclusively on storytelling and character development. That’s a bit boring. The real killer for the film is that it does not realize that a story that is only about character development turns out not to be about that either.

But, and it’s rather an important but… I find it hard to actually criticize the direction. ”This movie is not good,” does not lead, on its own, to any conclusions about the direction. Given that this is a reaction to a director being given a film, let’s not lose sight of what a director actually does, and in what senses he can be responsible for the overall quality of a film. And, let’s not forget that going into The Golden Compass we had Chris Weitz with two relevant entries to his resume, and he was walking into a behemoth and into the faces of some pretty big stars. This was not Steven Spielberg signing onto a new movie today and being given carte blanche to mold the movie into whatever he wanted.

The script was horribly overambitious, much of the acting was rather flat, and it was not hard to see that a good deal of its runtime was devoted to fitting in with the video game. On the other hand, what you can actually hold Weitz accountable for was all pretty good. The scenes were put together well. The script was managed pretty deftly, and translated to the screen into a workable, cohesive entity. The character development was brought forward well, and without flattening everything around it.

It translates pretty well into the Twilight series as far as I can see.

We’ll see what happens, but don’t write Weitz off completely. He’s not going to take an average, yet wildly popular series of books (like let’s say Harry Potter) and turn out something far better than the series ever deserves (like let’s say Prisoner of Azkaban), but he’s likely to do something rather interesting.

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