EEEEEEEEE! It’s time for The Twilight Saga: New Moon! Are you
ready?! Before going into the theater, there are a few things you’re
going to have to shove to the back of your mind—your love of
witty repartee, your knowledge of monster folklore, your hatred of CG
animals, and your intelligence. New Moon goes deep, deep, deep
into the uncharted forest of TEEN MELODRAMA, and if you can’t handle
it, you’re welcome to join Team Get the Eff Outta Here.
As most non-cave-dwellers know by now, human Bella Swan (Kristen
Stewart, still looking like a pretty stroke victim) and her boyfriend,
sparkly vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, still an alabaster
centenarian), are in love: deeply, madly, truly, annoyingly in
WUV. Sometimes you wonder why, since Bella is always mopey and
whining about wanting to be a vampire, and pasty Edward displays a few
traits that’re pretty domestic abuser-y, and…. shut up brain!
Anyway, at Bella’s 18th birthday party, the Cullens surprise her
with a party—but after a fateful paper cut (I shit you not), the
vampire family decides it’s best to get the hell out of Dodge before
Bella loses any more blood. Bella, naturally, goes into hormonal
lockdown over this news, sleepwalking through her life without Edward
and spending her nights screaming with night terrors.
Enter New Moon‘s sole purpose for existing: hubba-hubba,
muscle-ripped Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), who makes Edward look a
pile of regurgitated baby food. Half-naked Jacob helps Bella recover
from “the huge hole punched through her chest,” mostly by working on
motorcycles in his garage and facilitating her adrenaline junkie
impulses. (Turns out whenever Bella does something stupid and
dangerous, you see, she hallucinates an ectoplasm-y version of a
scolding Edward. Again, I shit you not.) Besides Bella’s new daredevil
turn, throw into the mix the fact that Jacob and his homies are a bunch
of hot, half-naked werewolves, and you’d think that New Moon would have enough action and suspense to blaze through its
two-hour-plus runtime. But there’s surprisingly little drama in New
Moon—it’s just a straight-ahead version of the novel,
terrible dialogue and a rambling plot intact.
What New Moon really excels at is funny little bits of humor
that break up the earnest adaptation of author Stephenie Meyer’s stiff
dialogue. Director Chris Weitz also reuses a few tricks from his
little-seen The Golden Compass (namely huge, clashing
über-beasts), and does an admirable job of acknowledging that,
yes, this vampire film is silly, but goddamnit he’s giving it
everything he’s got. Much in the way that every teenager is the world’s
biggest self-mythologizing drama queen, New Moon is the perfect
incarnation of every teenager—over-earnest, clumsy, and
occasionally amusing.