Let me start off by giving you an inclination as to how I felt about the first Twilight movie: it was, in a word, bad. That's not to say it wasn't entertaining; surely I was intrigued by where the story was taking me, and it held my attention for the duration of its two hour run. Upon a second viewing, however, once I already knew everything that was going to happen, I couldn't help but notice how poorly it was made. The editing was choppy, the shot composition left something to be desired (a few too many extreme close-ups, if you ask me), the direction was sub-par, and the acting was pretty stinkish. I did get a good laugh out of Edward's initial reaction upon seeing Bella though. And vampire baseball? In postproduction, somebody must have thought "This concept on its face isn't quite ludicrous enough. I know... let's play 'Supermassive Black Hole' by Muse over the scene. That should make it suitably ridiculous." I won't even get into any of the other absurdities, but I can say that in a movie full of unintentional humor and bored actors, Billy Burke as Charlie Swan and his bits of comic relief were just that: a welcome relief. Ultimately, Twilight was a reasonably engaging but poorly produced story. But enough about the first movie.
I found that, in some areas where Twilight failed, New Moon succeeded. For example, the acting wasn't quite as bad this time around; Robert Pattinson wasn't a total spaz and, at points, seemed to actually care about what was going on. For most of his time onscreen, though, he was his normal aloof self. Kristen Stewart put in what was probably the best performance of her life; at times it almost seemed like she too was more than just a drugged-out robot. Maybe it's just the moody tone of the movie or the brooding natures of the roles, but both Pattinson and Stewart rarely show any emotion via facial expressions, which gives their characters all the personality of two dry chunks of wood. In Pattinson's defense, I think it may just be the role, because I saw a trailer before the movie in which he was featured, and he seemed pretty animated. Stewart, on the other hand, may as well have been playing Bella Swan when she starred in Adventureland, so I'm guessing her interest deficiency is rooted either in her acting ability or her own natural personality.
This is Bella's pensive face. It's also her happy face,
angry face, excited face, sad face, shocked face,
embarrassed face, relieved face, and hungry face.
Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black was also featured much more prominently in New Moon, and as I've already said, he's actually interesting and fun to watch. His character is real and human, someone you can actually relate to, which makes his time on screen that much more valuable than Edward's. Incidentally, Edward spends about half the movie away in Italy, which is just great, because Jacob's dynamic with Bella is far more engrossing than her surreal relationship with Edward.
The biggest problem with New Moon is that, even though it upped the quality a little bit in a few departments, it actually fails in most of the places where Twilight succeeded. My major complaint is that the pacing... in New Moon... is sooooooooooo... slooooooooooow. They took an hour and a half worth of movie and stretched it out to two hours and ten minutes by riddling the dialogue with a mind-bending number of pregnant pauses. Did I mention that there is a veritable metric ton of dialogue? Then there's the plot progression. In the first movie, a setting was established and events were moved forward, however angstily. Bella moves to Forks, Washington, makes friends, meets Edward Cullen, develops an awkward fixation for him, is conflicted by said fixation, learns he's a vampire, struggles to wrap her mind around that fact, spends quality time with his oddly accommodating family, and then, in the most interesting 20 minutes or so, gets chased by a gang of evil vampires who have been hunting people and sucking their blood before being cornered and caught in the middle of a relatively cool vampire fight scene. In New Moon... well, we find out that Jacob is a werewolf. And about half an hour in, after Edward leaves, Bella and Jacob talk. A lot. A majority of the movie is a giant DTR (that's "define the relationship," kids) conversation between Bella and Jacob... and this, aside from the few werewolf action scenes, is the most interesting stuff that happens in the whole film (again, thanks in large part to Taylor Lautner).
Effectively though, I can't really figure out exactly what happened in New Moon that warranted making it its own installment. Aside from the conflicting signals that Bella consistently gave Jacob, the revelation that Jacob was part of a really cool unit of werewolves, and Edward running off to Italy to be an emo kid, basically nothing really happened at all. In fact, speaking of Italy, I don't even know what bearing that sequence had on the rest of the movie. I could plop New Moon into Windows Movie Maker, completely cut out the entire half hour chunk where they go to Italy to see the Volturi, and the continuity of the film would be totally unaffected (if I did that, though, you'd miss out on Dakota Fanning's glorified cameo, wherein she stared intensely at Edward for a few moments). If they don't introduce zombies as another movie monster faction in Eclipse and build up to some kind of apocalyptic war between all these groups, I'm not really sure where this story is gonna go.
Charlie Swan's backyard in Breaking Dawn (fingers crossed)
Upon my initial viewing of New Moon, I decided it was better than Twilight, and by and large, the production quality actually was improved. After digesting it for a while, though, I've concluded that the reason I liked it more at first was because Jacob is just a cooler character than Edward, and this movie features Jacob. The film achieves very little in the area of plot progression, the pacing is way too slow, and it failed to draw me in, even in the capacity that the first one did.
The Verdict:
AWESOME
Sweet
Okay
Meh
Poopy
-Billy
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2 comments:
Three things.
First, they extensive dialoge between Bella and Jacob is part of the book. In fact, almost the entire book involves the tension between Bella and Jacob. Twilighters everywhere choose whether they are Team Jacob or Team Edward. First-time readers wonder whether Bella will actually forget Edward like he told her too and date Jacob and live happily ever after.
Second, this is the reason why the movie is so long. Its supposed to be tense. And much of the dialoge came from the book. If you read the books, you might enjoy it better.
Third,this book is important not only because it established the Jacob and Bella relationship. It introduces the Voulturi who will be imporant later. But it is also a growing time for Bella.
PS
You will probly hate Eclipse.
--Danielle Paul
I don't doubt it's an interesting story (I'm planning on reading the books soon myself, actually), but this review is based strictly on my experience with the film, and in that vein, I was unimpressed. Still, one of my favorite books of all time, The Firm by John Grisham, was butchered by cinema in much the same way I assume New Moon was... while The Firm was an incredibly intense and gripping read, the movie was a complete snooze. Anyway, thanks for your feedback. If anything else strikes you, don't hesitate to let us know.
-Billy
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