Twilight: New Moon – Movie Review

I REALLY hadn’t planned to spend $12.50 and 2.5 hours of my life on Twilight: New Moon, I swear. I could have eventually seen so far as to make it a part of my Netflix queue, but don’t consider that as testament to actual enthusiasm on my part – my queue is topping out just under three hundred titles at the moment. And as for being a discerning Netflixer, in my queue I have crap like Scarecrow Gone Wild and Starrbooty (starring RuPaul!).

Add to this my wholeheartedly BLAH feelings for the first installment, and the dead last thing I thought I would be doing this Friday was contributing to what I felt would be a bloated, undeserved, record-breaking gross. In fact, I felt a little duty bound to NEVER see New Moon in a theater at all. Because while the franchise itself is a juggernaut and the sequels are no doubt inevitable, my own cinephilic integrity demanded that I not tacitly endorse this film in a monetary fashion.

But then Jonathan London came to New York this week and my resolutions went out the window.

We were supposed to go see John Woo’s Red Cliff at New York’s Sunshine Cinema on Thursday night. But instead of being allowed to go to the box office to get our tickets, the NYPD held us back, because the New Moon premiere screening was just getting out. For those of you not from New York, the Sunshine is an independent/arthouse theater, the kind of place where you’d see a Coen Brothers or Wong Kar Wei film. The last thing we expected was to be stuck in the rain, ears assaulted by the shrill shrieks of estrogen addled 15-year-olds swooning over Robert Pattinson’s bony ass as he photo-walked to his waiting Escalade. But there we were. It occurred to me that some PR flak who scheduled the Twilight premiere had picked the Sunshine cinema out of a sense of irony. While I was momentarily stunned to think of Twilight and irony in the same sentence, Jonathan, with a Geekscape episode to tape the next day, suggested I go see it.

And now, a multiple choice question:

Jonathan wanted Jim to see Twilight: New Moon because –
A) Given the movie’s huge hype and fanbase, it would be timely to talk about it on a Geekscape podcast with someone who had actually seen it. Jim is unemployed and will add the cost of the movie ticket to his deduction on his 2009 tax return anyway.
B) Jim, like Jonathan himself, is a bit of a cinephilic masochist who enjoys bad/mediocre movies, especially for the express purpose of busting on them mercilessly, and ESPECIALLY busting on them in a public forum like a podcast.
C) Jim has an old school/traditionalist preference in his vampire stories. Accordingly, Jonathan realized Twilight’s wimpy vampires/campy teen melodrama/Christian overtones/overall mediocrity might incense Jim and result in a florid, expletive filled review/diatribe.
D) Jim had recently told Jonathan about the vampire sexual fetishism that Twilight inspires, as evidenced by a Twilight style dildo that has been successfully launched in the adult novelty marketplace. Jim gave Jonathan jaw-dropping product descriptions of the device including (but not limited to) its pallid coloring, sparkling glitter (take it out in the daylight!) and temperature retaining silicone composition (stick it in the fridge for that authentic vampire experience!). X-Rated unauthorized cash-in product + Outwardly wholesome Christian PG-13 rated movie = Hilarious Podcast!
E) Jonathan thinks Jim is gayer than a spring lamb. You know, the one in that Disney cartoon. Not only does Jim inexplicably know about Twilight dildos, he will lustfully enjoy New Moon’s tribe of muscular half-naked wolfboys, and especially shirtless Robert Pattinson in all his milky white glittery glory!

If you’ve seen the podcast, you know that the correct answer is all of the above, EXCEPT E. And although I am not gay, if I had any proclivity whatsoever this movie could have pushed me over. I haven’t seen so much gratuitous Native American man-flesh since Oliver Stone’s The Doors.

For those of you who have seen/will see the podcast, I won’t reiterate its content for the sake of redundancy, except to say that I am wholeheartedly sorry to the staff and customers of Forbidden Planet for reading the aforementioned explicit dildo product descriptions in so public a setting. To those juvenile consumers whose parents whisked you out of the anime section that evening, I sincerely hope they have not subsequently prohibited your further purchases of Pokemon cards. And to those same parents, let me add that when your child ultimately graduates from Pokemon to Urotsukidoji, I admit no legal culpability. There is no causative link between my words and your nascent adolescent’s sudden addiction to anime tentacle porn. Your lawsuit is with Bandai, not with me.

Clearly, I am NOT part of the core target audience for the Twilight films. But judging by the placement of the film’s advertising and promotions at places like comic conventions, the folks in the Summit Entertainment marketing department sure seem to THINK that an older male geek like me would be interested. I’m older and maler than the tween and teen hardcore fangirls in their Team Edward and Team Jacob shirts, but still they want me and my money anyway.

On the surface, I will admit there are a lot of good reasons to think that the Twilight Saga might cross pollinate to the my segment of the geek community. So why the hell do Edward and his sparkly brethren make me cringe the way regular vampires do from crosses and sunlight?

To start with, Twilight’s genre and stylistic elements are definitely friendly and familiar ground. Big budget supernatural fantasy stories, with lots of characters and complex mythologies? Um, yeah, I love those. The Lord of the Rings extended edition DVDs are a prominent part of my DVD collection, complete with the collector slipcase (available by mail with ROTK if you had purchased the first two already). The Star Wars movies were so intrinsic to my development between the films and toys that I can’t imagine my childhood without them (the prequels are another matter). The Harry Potter movies, while not a personal favorite, often prove intriguing enough (and are typically well cast, which helps) that I’ll venture into a theater, and even when the results are middling, it’s still pretty enjoyable. What’s so different with Twilight?

Well, for starters, the plotting and logic of the story is convoluted, inconsistent, and thoroughly ludicrous. New Moon begins at Bella’s birthday party she accidentally gives herself a paper cut. Edward’s twitchy brother hasn’t discovered the vampire equivalent of methadone yet, so he joneses for her blood so badly that Edward shoves her out of his way like a linebacker. Never mind that Bella weighs eighty-five pounds and he launches her directly into a glass table, this is his way of protecting her. Naturally it makes everything worse, Edward decides it’s too dangerous for them to be together, but rather than just leave himself, his entire family packs up and leaves town and cuts off all contact from her – according to him, it’s because people have started to notice his dad isn’t aging, but since the entire family returns to town at the end of the story anyway, it seems like VERY specious reasoning. His departure makes Bella depressed beyond mopey-so depressed we get a montage dedicated to her mopeyness, which takes about three months of story time and two minutes of screentime, during which Bella sits in a chair while the camera spins around her, and emo music plays while the seasons change. We’ve just started getting into the story, and we’ve already got Edward hurting Bella in an effort to protect her, and uprooting his entire family with his decision to split off from her. Oh, and by the way, the family is her only protection from those evil vamps from the last movie, but I guess the Cullens just forgot about those guys, huh?

Fortunately, Jacob and his Fabio-esuqe hair happen to be a werewolf who can protect her from them, and Bella starts spending time with him to rebound. But first, to get the mopeyness out of her system, Bella discovers that when she’s in danger, like say, by getting on a motorcycle, she gets a fleeting vision of Edward telling her to not do things. Who wouldn’t want to see Ziggy Stardust Jr. chiding them like a Sunday school teacher every time you do some chancy or morally ambiguous activity? So Bella’s big strategy is to buy a motorcycle and not wear a helmet, and in the lingering moments before her concussed brain turns into something resembling a head of cauliflower, she’ll get to see Mr. Sparkle acting wussy. She recruits Jacob to fix the junky mud rocket she bought, because, well, why not, and of course she can take advantage of his free labor because he’s into her. Then Jacob gets initiated into the wolfpack with the other reservation boys, cuts his hair so he looks like an underwear model, and decides to put bros before hos. Apparently Bella hasn’t been watching the same movies as the rest of us, because she has to literally see one of these guys change right in front of her to figure out what’s going on. It turns out that guys in Jacob’s tribe have werewolf genes, they hate vampires, and oh yeah, there’s a real danger that if one of them gets pissed at his girlfriend he might wolf out and claw half her face off. Just ask Sam the pack leader’s girlfriend, Emily Half-Face.

Reviewer pang of liberal conscience/political correctness:
Um…does anybody else have a problem with an allegory that basically suggests that Native Americans might be genetically predisposed to be wife-beaters? Show of hands?

And now, back to our story:
Bella is still hung up on Edward. Guess once you’ve had glitter, everything else tastes bitter. She goes cliff diving to get another look at him, Jacob dives in to save her, takes her home, is about to get some, when Edward calls her and cock-blocks him. But since Jacob answered the phone, Edward thinks Bella is dead, and decides to travel to Italy to make the most convoluted suicide attempt ever.

Let’s begin. There are these three Italian vampires who dress like tasteful Renaissance pimps. One looks like Macaulay Culkin after a hard weekend, one looks like Geoffrey Rush after swallowing a bottle of Vicodin, and the leader appears to be the bastard love child of Bronson Pinchot and Paul Reubens. These guys, the Voltroni I think they’re called, are the vampire government, and they kill vampires who break the law. So Edward has decided to break the vampire law by walking shirtless during some Catholic ritual where everyone in town is wearing red robes so he’ll look extra extra pale and sparkly. First of all, if Edward had picked any major city in the world to do this in, NO ONE WOULD BAT AN EYE. Pale skinny shirtless guy covered in glitter? He’s just a gay club boy finally coming down from last night’s second tab of ecstasy. Secondly, anyone truly serious about killing themselves wouldn’t do it in such a passive, wishy washy way. If Edward REALLY meant to do it, and if it were to have any chance of actually happening, he would’ve broken off the nearest table leg, held it to his chest and fallen on top of it. Bam! DONE! The whole suicide attempt is done purely to create something resembling suspense, but there’s one problem: no one in the audience in their right mind believes there’s any chance that he’s actually going to succeed. At my screening, people actaully laughed, renewing my faith in humanity in general. So Bella prevents Edward from offing himself, he Voltroni are still pissed, which results in some inconsequential fisticuffs in which no one gets klled. Then one pointless argument about who gets to do what to whom, the Voltroni decide to leave them alone, and Bella and Edward get to go home, but for such morally upright vampires they don’t lift a finger to help the American tourists who will be their lunch.

They get back home, and Jacob is of course pissed off at being cock blocked, but that’ll wait until the next sequel. Meanwhile, rather than go through all of this BS again, Bella just wants to be made a vampire, finally displaying the only thimbleful of common sense present in the entire movie. She then makes Edward’s family vote on whether or not they turn her into one. Imagine a family taking a vote on whether or not their son gets to (metaphorically) pork his girlfriend. As the movie started to come to a close, I thought to myself, ‘Only a Mormon could write something like this.’ And then Stephanie Meyer finally did something I DIDN’T expect. She one-upped herself, and not in a good way.

Edward tells Bella that OK, he’ll turn her into a vampire. But he wants her to wait three years. And he’ll only do it if she MARRIES him. As I laughed in the theater (and I had plenty of company) I could imagine Stephanie Meyer in her little writer’s room in her house, probably complete with needlepoint samplers of Bible quotations, smiling sanguinely as she wrote those words and her magic Mormon underwear rode up on her. I can imagine her there even now, rewriting the Frankenstein story so he’s a nice doctor who wants to make a pure perfect boy for some pretty deserving girl to love, but he only harvests parts from people who fill out organ donor cards. And that boy will be so lovely, a patchwork quilt of hunky goodness without the pesky existential torment that makes him want to kill everyone.

This was, is, and ultimately, will always be my problem with the Twilight series, in whatever form and medium: Meyer and her fans think it’s Romeo and Juliet meets Dracula. But in order for there to be tragedy and horror, there actually have to be, y’know, tragedy and horror. And pretending something is epic and Gothic when it is, in fact, just insipid, makes it pretentious in addition to being insipid. This is what it does instead: Twilight takes what is at heart a Gothic idea and gives it a warm, sanitized Christian heart. It’s like making an ice cream sandwich by taking a scoopful of vanilla and putting it between two slices of garlic bread. It takes all that dark, violent sexual death energy, makes it wear a promise ring, and tells it ‘True love waits.’ It takes a myth that is, at its heart, about blood, and makes it completely bloodless. It’s appropriate that none of the vampires in Twilight sport actual fangs; this is a story with no real teeth, just the kind of adolescent sturm and drang that only seems important when you’re fourteen. Unfortunately for Stephanie Meyer, many of those fourteen year old girls will grow up to be eighteen year old girls who will go to secular colleges and have bisexual roommates. But unfortunately for the rest of us, there are more fourteen year old girls every single day, and so long as they spend money, Edward and his family will continue to sparkle on.