The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

With chick-lit fans swooning like hormonal teenagers over a dreamy vampire, the first Twilight film became a little engine that could. Its success secured the adaptation of the rest of the series in short order. Success, however, is not an indicator of quality. New Moon hammers home the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you know me or have read my review for the first film, you probably know what’s coming next.

Bella doesn’t like the fact that she’s growing “older” than her vampire boyfriend Edward, so she asks him to convert her to his kind. Edward doesn’t like the fact that anytime Bella gets a paper cut his adopted ‘brother’ Jasper goes berserk and tries to attack her. In true teenage melodrama fashion, Edward blows Bella off, ends their relationship and moves out of town with his family. It’s sudden, nonsensical and (for Bella) heart-breaking.

After a few months of moping, Bella discovers that every time she does anything dangerous she sees Edward as if he were right beside her. This leads her down a path of daredevil antics that nearly gets her killed. She also gets to know her childhood pal Jacob Black, who is harboring a mysterious secret of his own. He falls in love with her but Bella doesn’t reciprocate, leading him to trick the Cullen’s into thinking that Bella has died. This drives Edward, who still loves her after all, to expose himself to humans, which will force the Volturi (a powerful group of ancient vampires) to destroy him. Catching wind of this, Bella frantically tries to stop him.

If you think I just gave away the entire plot of the film, then you haven’t seen any of the trailers. They lay out just about every detail I listed above. It’s one of the many oddities about this film series. Their marketing efforts are focused solely on those who have read the books and already know what’s going to happen. The first Twilight film fell victim to this as you had to wait around for an hour to find out the obvious- Edward is a vampire. Similarly, New Moon makes you wait roughly an hour to discover another obvious fact- Jacob is a werewolf. If you didn’t see this coming, then you haven’t seen the trailers or read the books, and your ability to pick up on foreshadowing from the first film is woefully underdeveloped.

In many ways, Bella’s discovery of Jacob’s secret mirrors her discovery of Edward’s blood-sucking tendencies in the first film. She is drawn to him only as a friend, so there is minimal hormonal lip-biting, but just like Edward, Jacob is there to save Bella from her clumsiness and poor decisions. Edward disappeared on very sunny days, driving Bella to wonder. This time, Jacob disappears for weeks on end without explanation. While Edward is cold to the touch, Jacob and his werewolf brethren are extremely warm to the touch. In fact, they generate so much body heat that young werewolf men are forced to walk around shirtless to keep cool, exposing their mega-buff bodies.

That’s right- just as author Stephanie Meyer made up a bunch of stuff about vampires for Twilight, she shows a similar disregard for historical werewolf lore in New Moon. Jacob and his tribesmen don’t turn into the traditionally hideous man-beasts of old either. Rather, they turn into gigantic wolves. Despite a larger budget, the visual effects are still sorely lacking. Also, the notion that these buff lycanthropes need to go sans-shirt panders to both the author’s and viewers’ adolescent desires to see hot guys.

One of the worst examples of story progression in recent memory occurs when Edward finally calls to check on Bella after giving her the cold, quiet treatment for months on end. Jacob is with her and answers the phone. He leads Edward to believe that his love is dead. Edward goes all suicidal vampire without even as much as a second call to anyone else who might be able to corroborate Bella’s fate.

This turning point finally produces some action, though, just like in Twilight, it comes nearly three-quarters of the way through the movie. From here on out New Moon adopts a break-neck pace that throws new faces and places at you too quickly to remember them all. Then, to top it all off, is the mother of all anticlimactic cliff-hanger endings. If nothing else, Jacob’s stern warning to Bella and Edward gives me hope that the third installment of this series will actually have some kind of sustained plot and tension running the whole way through. It would certainly be a major improvement over the first two.

Twi-hards may go gaga over this film because it brings their beloved, if not poorly-developed, characters to life. The sad truth is that New Moon repeats the Twilight formula in a way that is even less satisfying than its predecessor. If the screenwriters were true to the book than Meyer has no concept of adequate story pacing whatsoever. But perhaps the most egregious sin committed here is this: New Moon is a story that involves both vampires and werewolves yet it equates to two-plus hours of almost sheer boredom.

RATING: 2 out of 5