Issue date: 11/23/09 Section: M2 (Arts & Entertainment)

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Rated PG-13, 130 minutes Summit Entertainment Verdict: D+

NOTE: Spoiler alert! And if you like “Twilight,” you might dislike this review.

It was bound to happen.

Part two of the ever-popular Twilight saga, “New Moon” premiered much to the delight of millions of moviegoers, and much to the chagrin of this moviegoer.

The series isn’t my favorite one, in fact, I’d go so far to say that I hated it and considered it a crime against the English language. But that’s just me.

I’ll try to remain as objective as I can, but my restraint can only go so far.

The story of the movie is as such: ordinary girl Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) celebrates her 18th birthday, worries that’s she’s going to become an old, wrinkly bag while her evergreen immortal sparkly vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), will remain the same age for all of eternity. Edward throws her a surprise birthday party, and she gets a paper cut in a house full of vampires.

For some reason, Edward shoves her into a table of vases, which only makes it worse. Following this, Edward decides it best for his family and himself to leave Bella to the wolves. Literally.

After months of depression, she finally comes out of her shell and becomes closer with Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), a Native American from the local reserve, and through this, does reckless things because for some odd reason, she sees her beloved Edward appear in a ghostlike fashion telling her not to do reckless things.



After some time, Jacob falls off the face of the planet with Bella, and come to find out, he’s a werewolf. But not everything is peachy in Forks, Washington.

Victoria, the red-headed vampire who got 30 seconds of screen time and four lines in the last movie has made the declaration that she’s coming for Bella and is going to kill her in the most gruesome way possible. Jacob, being the white knight replacement figure that he is, decides to step up and protect Bella in the absence of her beloved Edward. However, he can’t protect her from herself. She still continues to do reckless things to see her beloved and jumps off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean.

Edward thinks that she’s dead and decides to snuff out his own life.

In a fit of desperation, Bella and Alice Cullen, one of the other vampires, decide to travel to Italy where he plans on committing the deed. She gets there just in time and saves him from himself. However, the vampire aristocracy, the Volturi, have taken special attention to her “gift”: she is completely immune to the vampires’ powers, and want to “change” her.

After an altercation, the Cullens agree to change her themselves, and Edward agrees to change her on one condition: that she marries him.

After that, the movie “ends.” Quite possibly one of the most awkward endings I’ve seen in my life, but if you constitute an “ending” as a lack of video footage being displayed to the audience, then it “ended.”

The pacing of the movie can be summed up in a single word: glacial. The movie is so slow, so long, that it seems like it goes on and on for an eternity. As muc h as I despised the first movie, “Twilight,” I at least was furious at it for it simply existing.

This one was more of an uphill battle to stay awake. Thankfully enough, the monotony of the movie was broken up by the occasional action sequence, which, while few and far between, seemed to be one of the more redeeming factors of this movie.

The camerawork of this movie is simply atrocious. There were a few sequences that were on the verge of giving me motion sickness, and when the camera wasn’t doing that, it instilled a very, very deep running sense of claustrophobia, as the camera was zoomed in to people’s faces a good 80% of the time.

It seemed like every time two characters were having an exchange or one was going on a monologue, they felt the need to get very, very personal with the person speaking the lines, almost as a crutch to hide bad on-screen physical presence.

The acting in the movie was still extremely awkward; Kristen Stewart’s pale, expressionless mask of a face as well as her flat, monotone delivery fail to generate any real excitement. While he didn’t get very much screen time, Pattinson’s overall appearance and delivery just made him seem like an emo version of Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter. Every scene he was in, he was standing in the distance, looking sorry for himself.

Surprisingly enough, probably the best role in this film was Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black, whose delivery was at least dynamic and at least gave the illusion of decent acting.

If you hated the series before you went into it, then you’re going to hate it. If you didn’t, then, well, you’re probably going to hate it now.

Aaron can be reached at aaburch@umflint.edu.

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