Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) may be the unluckiest character in literary history. She certainly is close to the most pathetic if not naive as well. How unfortunate it is to have to fill the gaping hole left in your heart from a departed vampire lover with a new werewolf lover? Certainly there has to be a mortal boy or two at her small town Washington high school, no?
That would certainly solve most if not all of her emotional afflictions, which in New Moon, the follow-up to Catherine Hardwick’s Twilight adaptation, are pushed out of the realm of innocent and dumb teenage after school special flirtation and into that of unbearable melodrama.
Bella and Edward
Bella’s love belongs to the vampire Edward Cullen who is played by Robert Pattison and looks like the son if Bela Lugosi, is eternally posed in some dark tableau of deep suffering and whose hair seems to have its own center of gravity. Fearing that such a mortal is not safe amidst his family of bloodsuckers, he ditches Bella and disappears in hopes of protecting her.
Of course the split hits hard; so hard in fact that Bella’s suffering surpasses that of general high school moping and instead keeps her up at night screaming out in such pain that you’d think she was in the throes of a heroin intervention program. That’s why it is unwise to give all of your love the only boy in class who would rather bite your neck than caress it.
What Bella discovers though is that, whenever placed in any sort of mortal danger, visions of Edward appear, who warns her against her actions. Bella thus becomes an adrenaline junky and in one scene narrowly escapes disaster when she crashes a dirt bike at top speed after being distracted by Edward. Although still a teenager, she should know that there is no greater danger while operating a dirt bike than the appearance of apparitions taking the outward appearance of former immortal lovers.
Jacob the Werewolf
In an effort to cope with her pain, Bella begins becoming close with her neighbour Jacob (the invariably shirtless Taylor Lautner), who is both Native American and, she soon discovers after he too abandons her without explanation, is slowly turning into a werewolf as he ages. As if puberty isn’t hard enough to deal with. The werewolves of course are part of his tribe and have a pact with the vampires, their enemies, which agree that they will leave each other alone, so long as the vampires stay on their own land and don’t run around biting humans.
This proves to be a problem as Bella’s feelings are caught between both Edward and Jacob and so forth. There is also a rather fruitless subplot about Edward travelling to Rome to kill himself in front of a vampire committee of some sort named the Vultrians after he believes Bella has died during one of her adrenaline rushes.
The Vulturians are lead by Aro who is played by the British actor Michael Sheen who goes just over-the-top enough here, his body twisting and contorting in on itself, to prove him a man in serious need of a leading role in an Anne Rice adaptation.
Directed by Chris Weitz
The film this time was directed by Chris Weitz. Weitz, a more honest storyteller to Catherine Hadrwick’s more stylistic tendencies, trades in the ugly blue murk that covered the first Twilight film and replaces it with a brighter, more natural autumn look. And that’s about the only difference. Weitz, a good filmmaker is awash in a sea of juvenile, ridiculous and, more often than not, just plain dump material.
What’s most shocking is how very little actually happens in the film, which feels like a constant build up to some big event that never quite gets around to happening; as if audiences are only getting the introduction to the next film. But the first film did that too. Bella loses Edward, gains and loses Jacob, is attacked by bad vampires, is saved by good wolves, is reunited with Edward, is taken in front of the Vulturian and so on and so forth. But there is no overriding dramatic ark that makes the story feel like a self-sufficient whole.
The entire crux of the film is then placed on this silly, uninspired, two-thirds immortal high school love triangle. But at the close of 2009, the least one could expect from a special-effects fueled blockbuster is some meaningful action that its characters are engaged in and that propels the story into some sort of complete narrative.
At the end of the day all of the scenes with the vampires and the werewolves and the Vulturians are simply a collection of surplus episodes that all lead up to the slender but dire question of whether or not Bella and Edward will end up together again.
New Moon by Stephanie Meyer
It would be hard to blame Weitz or any of the cast and crew involved in the Twilight adaptations because all problems seem to originate between the pages of Stephanie Meyer’s books from which they are based. The books, although aimed at a preteen market, are written at about a nearly incompetent third grade level and would seem to have no concept in the politics of drama, plot or story structure. It doesn’t help that the screenplays are written by Mellisa Rosenberg at the same level of incompetence.
Here's an exchange, directed at Bella from a fiancé of one of the werewolves:
“So you’re the vampire girl?”
“Yeah, so you’re the wolf girl?”
“Yeah. Well, at least I’m engaged to one.”
What? She’s engaged to a wolf girl? How could such horrible, stupid dialogue pass by into the finished cut of the film unnoticed?
It therefore seems that Twilight needs to be put into complete artistic turnaround. It needs a director and writer who are willing to break it down, move it as far away from the original texts as possible and rebuilt it back from the ground up. Fat chance of that happening.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Mike Lippert - I am 22 years old and am currently living in the small town of Walkerton Ontario. I Spent fours years at Wilfed Laurier University in ...
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