The Twilight Saga: New Moon Movie Review

Film adaptations of wildly popular books is a tricky realm at the best of times. There are so many things to balance, even above and beyond the normal host of things to balance, that you’d hate to bet on success… except in terms of dollars, of course. You’ve got to find a way to appease the rabid fans, but you also have to make it possible for the uninitiated to wander in, and somehow it has to come together to create a film that works on its own. It really is a curious test for screenwriters and directors, when they have to figure out what can be cut, what must be left in, and what can be changed completely when it is required to make a workable film.

Before we are long into The Twilight Saga: New Moon there is a great example of the work involved. We spin around Bella, and the months tick by. She sits in the depths of despair, and we get the idea. You can’t film untold pages of, “…and the next day she moped around…and the next day she moped around,” no matter how the minutiae of this trivial passage of time may make for good reading. Good story or bad, it would simply be the most boring movie ever.

It is here, finding ourselves a few minutes into the over two-hour runtime, that the good decisions and positive statements come to an end.

I am inclined to express the sheer wonder inspired by a film that has vampires and werewolves, and is nevertheless so intensely boring, but it would miss the point, and send you in the wrong direction as an opinion. I somehow expect to hear the point thrown around and quoted, possibly in the form, “Never has a movie with vampires been so boring,” but it is in this case not only easy to dismiss, but moreover almost trivially true. The game is, merely as a comparison to other stories with vampires, boring by design… or at least, the kind of thing that will be seen as boring to those who have more traditional versions of monster stories in mind.

Those in the know scoff at your vampire-related boredom. The fans did not come by degrees, and then leaps and bounds, to the series with thoughts along the lines of, “Thank God someone finally wrote another vampire story.”

No, the point here is that there has never been a more boring love story. Never has there been a love triangle, broken heart, heroine in impending mortal danger, or last-second rescue that was more boring. Never has there been a fight scene, dramatic revelation, or tense standoff that could provoke less interest.

While you would normally put the lion’s share of blame at the feet of the screenplay (or source material), the same screenwriter (and series) gave us a passable effort before. Twilight was overly indulgent, and suffered the same wooden dialog, but it worked as a fairly entertaining ride. Beyond the obvious trials of working with the script you have, everything about the directorial effort of Chris Weitz is not only wrong, it is unfathomably so. There is clearly no sure hand guiding the overall progression, or any individual scene. The effort is that of someone who thinks they are working with something along the lines of Reds, or Doctor Zhivago, and is utterly lost at what is necessary to make this entity into something watchable.

Whereas the first one was easy to dismiss as this one for many critics, I had to give it rather a high rating. It new what it was, and new generations need their own larks as much as mine. New Moon, on the other hand, has nothing going for it, except possibly delusions of grandeur. By the time we get around to anything you could legitimately describe as, “something that happens,” we are, as an audience, so dulled that we are unable to focus or care.

Oddly enough, the synopsis probably looks surprisingly interesting on paper. Werewolves hunting vampires, vampires after revenge, Shakespearean thoughts of love-lost suicide… there is much afoot frankly. And yet, this movie shambles along in a stupor to a degree that makes ironic mockery of our main vampire’s fear of soullessness.

Rating:  

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