Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The Twilght Saga: New Moon

Now I'm aware that I'm not the target audience of a romantic vampire themed movie. However, I am a fan of Ann Rice based movies, and the show True Blood, so I do know that good work in this genre is possible. The second installment of the Twilight Saga is certainly not an example of one. I did not care for the first one. The acting was some of the most wooden I'd ever seen, and the characters all struck me as overly dramatic. Painfully so.

This movie starts where the first one left off, with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her vampiric beau Edward Cullen (Edward Cullen). Him an his family leave town, and leave Bella heartbroken. She falls into a depression, and grows close to an old friend, Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), who happens to be a werewolf. A love triangle ensues, some war between vampires and werewolves is revealed, and whole slew of melodrama and mediocre visual effects engulfs the rest of the movie.

The weaknesses of the first movie are amplified here. Apparently Stewart views acting as a simple combination of biting her lip, dead-eyed looks to the left of the camera, and the occasional furrowed brow. The others don't treat the craft much better. The absurdity of the first one is also exaggerated here. I just wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake vigorously, screaming that highschool is not the end of their lives. At least the vampires were several hundred years old, or something like that. but Bella, c'mon, is your highschool crush really worth turning into a vampire? It's overly dramatic concepts like this that make it impossible to take these movies seriously.

I don't think I can blame the actors completely for their lack of performance. Taylor Lautner was among the worst offenders in this movie. Half the movie was spent sans-shirt, a quarter was spent as a poor CG wolf, and the final quarter was spent looking confused. Yet when he hosted Saturday Night Live this past week, he was absolutely hilarious. There can only one explanation for this disconnect- a terrible script, or a terrible director (considering Chris Weitz's previous movie, Golden Compass, essentially killed a franchise before it got off the ground- even though I liked it). Both of which would account for a majority of this movie's problems.

Box offices don't lie, however. A $200 million opening weekend means they're doing something right, and pretty much have a mandate to finish up the series. This is certainly not my cup of tea, but apparently it appeals to some (which we can only partially attribute to a shirtless Taylor Lautner). The audience for this movie already knows they're the audience. If you had to read this to decide whether you want to see it, I guarantee you don't.

0.5/5

3 comments:

Unknown said...

“Twilight: New Moon” was not as intense at the first one. It also lost the romance factor. I did not enjoy it as much as the first, but it still had a good energy to it. The special effects of the wolves were superb, especially at making these massive creatures life-like..

hazaribagh

SW said...

lmao. that trailer.

I just started watching True Blood, and at least that seems kinda fun. And less ridiculous than expected. Whereas with this trailer...is even worse than expected. Well so far I've also been able to avoid this crap.

Unknown said...

These movies are sooo bad. Yet...I continue to watch.

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