Rating:
2.5 out of 5
Eventually Edward comes to believe that Bella is dead, and heads to Italy to request that the vampire council known as the Volturi agree to kill him so he doesn’t have to live in a world without Bella. She, of course, isn’t dead and heads to Italy to stop him. There’s a a scene where they try to ratchet up the suspense that seems silly – if only they allowed her to call out much of the suspense would have been drained from the scene, and there’s no good reason for her not to have done that. Oh, and the method Edward comes up with to bring death upon himself doesn’t make any sense from the perspective of traditional vampire lore. I’ll elaborate in the following spoiler paragraph:
[SPOILER]
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Edward decides to break the main vampire rule, which is to not reveal himself to humans. To do this he removes his shirt and prepares to step into the sunlight in the middle of a local festival. In Twilight vampires “sparkle” so supposedly this would give him away. But if you saw some guy standing in a doorway in the sunlight sparkling, would you think “Vampire!” or would you think, “Check out the gay guy who’s covered himself in glitter.”?
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[END SPOILER]
At least the Volturi are suitably creepy, each of them in their own way – I actually liked the performance of the leader of the group. This is also were Dakota Fanning appears, and I hope you weren’t looking forward to a lot of on screen time from her here because she’s in the film for maybe five minutes tops.
Is there any actual action? Yes, there’s a semi-cool fight in the Volturi chamber and we get some werewolf scenes that serve to highlight some pretty bad CGI and shorts that rip upon transformation like tissue paper. I’d say overall there was bit more action than in the first film, but not a whole lot more.
Overall despite a bit of action and a few scattered laughs (the jokes related to the fictional movie “Face Punch” are pretty funny), I found the movie to be long, slow and fairly boring. Bella is annoyingly miserable and seems to me to be in serious need of therapy, anti-depressant medication, or perhaps a stronger father figure(?). I actually like the supporting characters better than the leads – her dad, his Native American buddy, and Bella’s friends were all pretty entertaining.
In the end, I can’t see New Moon being enjoyable to anyone other than Twilight fans, and if you’re the husband or boyfriend of a fan, do your best to find a way to avoid it (suggest a girl’s night out – there’s a free tip from me to you). And finally, I’d be curious to hear from Twilight fans whether this film was a better representation of the book than the first film, since I’ve seen complaints even from Twilight fans about the first movie.
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