Developing in the manner that an actor … Kristen Stewart in The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Poor rich Chris Weitz. Once considered a promising film-maker, through a circle about the time he successfully transformed Nick Hornby’s pleasant and enjoyable novel About a Boy into an equally facetious and enjoyable movie starring Hugh Grant and that kid from Skins, he now finds himself working as a hired hand on pellicle number two of the Twilight saga, the hugely received but strangely bloodless series based on Stephenie Meyer’s romantic books about a schoolgirl who falls in love with a vampire. The critics are predictably nonplussed by a movie that stretches to more than two hours, at least moiety of which is the celluloid equivalent of hanging out by a female Kevin the Teenager.
- The Twilight Saga: New Moon
- Production year: 2009
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 130 mins
- Directors: Chris Weitz
- Cast: Ashley Greene, Billy Burke, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellan Lutz, Kristen Stewart, Nikki Reed, Peter Facinelli, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner
- More steady this film
Heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) solely gets a few moments of beatitude at the beginning of the film before events display to leave her lovelorn and comfortless as abstinent bloodsucker Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) hotfoots it off to Italy in an attempt to provide her with a normal life. In his absence, she strikes up a friendship with her newly buff childhood pal Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who harbours a beyond the powers of nature secret of his very own.
“Constrained by the plot of the novel, the film keeps the sum of two units lovers apart for quite a unfold, robbing the project of the crazy-in-love energy that made Twilight, the first entry in the series, such a guilty pleasure,” writes the LA Times’s Kenneth Turan. “Weitz makes the vampire trains of Melissa Rosenberg’s qualified script depart privately on time, but he almost seems too rational a director on the side of this kind of project. This lack of animating madness combined through the novel’s demands give much of New Moon a marking time status.”
“There are some entertaining things about New Moon: Stewart is developing as an actor in a way Pattinson isn’t, and there are droll scenes in which some characters go and meet with films,” writes our own Peter Bradshaw. “But the franchise is looking a little anaemic.”
“Under Weitz’s direction, the actors have gained some confidence, and this chaste love triangle among creatures of the night has all the requisite looks of tortured longing,” writes The Telegraph’s Tim Robey. “What it misses is any spirit-stirring pulse: we appropriate wait and wait for the bleeding palpable.”
Of course, not one of the above is really catering for New Moon’s target audience, so perhaps a fairer representation would be the reaction from fans who attended the film’s first public screening in London’s Leicester Square last week. Skip forward to around the 40-second mark in the video below for a battering of youthful enthusiasm.
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New Moon, for me, is a marginal improvement on its predecessor, if only because Pattinson, an actor whose technique consists entirely of a sort of fixed, narcissistic pout and sullen-toned delivery, is absent through regard to much of the movie. Stewart, in the pivotal role of Bella, actually does comely useful with very little material to labor with. It’s been clear since her beautifully understated turn in Greg Mottola’sitting excellent Adventureland that she has the ability to play these type of damaged but enigmatic characters without resorting to histrionics.
Ultimately, yet, New Moon is merited way too long, and despite the odd visual flourish from Weitz – a marksman in which a painting of some vampires comes alive is a nice touch – this is basically Dawson’s Creek with more blood and teeth: enjoyably prosing entertainment for a hungover Sunday afternoon on the sofa, perchance, but hardly worthy of a pregnant screen outing.
I in addition have a major problem with what seems to me to be Meyer’s ruthless exploitation of foetal teenage emotions. The story seems to encourage juvenile people to hold on tight to their first love, no matter how much of the rest of their life is left in ruins. By the end of New Moon, as an intelligent 18-year-old, Bella surely ought to be girding her loins for some form of higher education and a whole renovated world of adventures. Instead she is angling to be turned into a vampire herself so that she may spend eternity with her undead lover. The pellicle’session objectionable suggestion is that it is acceptable to make greater life decisions whenever one is merely out of one’s teens.
What did you deem of New Moon, if you caught it over the weekend? Are the critics right to dismiss it? Or are you siding with the armed men of teenage fans in favor of whom R-Patz and K-Stew can do no wrong?
