Geekscape Movie Reviews – Stephen Reviews New Moon
As geeks, we tend to wish that our romantic partners would take more interest in all the things we obsess over. Whether it be Time Lords or Time Cops we want them to have some understanding of what we are talking about when we go off on one of the diatribes that we as geeks do so often.
Despite the fact that I still haven’t been able to get her to watch an episode of Doctor Who, I decided it was time to put my money where my mouth was and find out why my lady friend was so entranced by The Twilight Saga. Last week I watched Twilight and today I saw New Moon. I’m pretty sure that I still have no idea what the appeal is.
There’s not a whole lot for me to say about New Moon that Gilmore didn’t already cover in his Twilight review. I can say that despite the fact that this film could have been about 30 minutes shorter, this movie was a definite improvement over the last one. It looked better and it made a bit more sense as a film that stands alone from the book (but not much).
Chris Weitz is a more than capable director. Despite its flaws, About a Boy is one of my favorite movies. The big difference here is that About a Boy comes from source material that I can actually enjoy. The subject matter is adult, the dialogue is clever and the characters are three dimensional and fully formed. If this were a review of About a Boy I could go on and on…unfortunately it’s not.
New Moon picks up at the beginning of senior year for newly 18 years old Bella and her love struck 109 year old sparkly vampire boyfriend, Edward. After another contrived excuse and painful conversation, Edward decides that he needs to leave Bella and never see her again. Apparently the only way to do things in Twilight world is with as much drama and hyperbole as possible.
Again with the woods? and why isn’t he sparkling? looks sunny there to me.
Bella has a tough time with this, as you can probably imagine. She has night terrors and some sort of thing that makes her stare out a bay window for 3 months. Eventually, she finds out that whenever she is in danger Edward will appear to warn her. So of course she decides to put herself in as much danger as possible. She buys motorcycles and gets her Native American friend, Jacob, who obviously has feelings for her, to help her fix the motorcycles. Essentially she uses the guy who has a crush on her to help her fuel her obsession with another guy. Total bitch move.
It takes about another 3 months for them to finish the motorcycles and at this point I feel like I have actually been in the theater for that whole 6 months. Then all of a sudden Jacob decides to ditch her as well. Apparently he has started turning into a wolf with his shirtless pack of friends. Also, despite having a treaty with Edward’s family for 100 years or so, these wolves hate vampires and since Bella is a vampire lover they can’t be friends.
There’s a whole other subplot to the movie about 2 vampires who want to kill Bella and how the wolves have to hunt them down. So Jacob has to protect Bella. Then selfish Bella who everyone is trying to protect from everyone except herself decides to jump off a cliff so that she can see Edward. It is at this point that I’m ready to jump off a cliff. Nothing these characters do makes any sense to me. They constantly talk about what might happen. I might maul you. I might eat you. Yet they don’t give a single thought to the consequences of their actions such as they’re jumping off a cliff. They embody everything I hate about overreacting, irrational teenagers.
More shirtless-ness as Jacob rescues Bella from her stupid self.
There’s more ripping off from Romeo and Juliet and the film finally gets interesting when we are introduced to the vampire royal family, The Volturi. Michael Sheen is fantastic as Aro. Finally, after nearly 4 hours, Including Twlight, we meet a vampire who is interesting and charismatic. Of course he is only on screen for all of 15 minutes and what happens during the scene is as confusing as the rest of the film.
Apparently one of the reasons that Edward loves Bella is that she is the only person whose mind he can’t read. Aro discovers that his power to read thoughts through touch don’t work on Bella either nor do those of Jane, played by Dakota Fanning. As I start to finally believe that maybe there is something special about Bella, I remember that two other vampires earlier in the movie could use their powers on her. So, I guess it’s just a fluke? Is that the kind of answer I want from a movie like this.
Why can’t we get a movie about these vampires?
The answer is no, but these movies aren’t for me. These movies are for people who are going to swoon at shirtless Jacob and shirtless Edward. These movies are not for geeks like me who are going to be perplexed by why some vampires have special powers and some don’t. Why do the vampires who do have powers all have different powers? My supernatural creatures need rules and it is out of those rules that the real drama and suspense can be born.
I don’t know how to really close this review because this film left me asking too many simple questions that I feel could have been answered with a tighter narrative and a focus less on constipated conversations and more on actual story. It was long and drawn out and missed several opportunities to actually bring this love story to life. It almost feels as though it strived to trade character development for shirtless boys with supernatural powers. I could have looked past the cheesy teenager dialogue. I could have even looked past all the shirtlessness if there had been an actual story here.
From what I hear I would have a lot less questions and a lot better understanding of the characters and their motives if I had read the books. To me that’s the biggest mistake a film like this could make. But what do I know? With the biggest midnight opening dollars ever, the numbers speak for themselves.
