New Moon – Review

Yes, folks, I did it. I sacrificed both my manhood and standards and saw New Moon. When writing a film review, one has to look at the piece from a number of different angles – direction, story, acting and soundtrack to name a few. When looking back on the two and a half hours I spent earlier today watching New Moon, however, all I could see was bad.

It’s not that New Moon is intrinsically a bad film. The direction surprised me, actually – the camera work was interesting and varied without seeming all-over-the-place, and the film was presented reasonably well. That said, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the audience was being slowly dragged through an extremely transparent plot – the film is predictable to say the least, and it more than takes its time unleashing the “twists” littered throughout.

This man is the reason no teenage girl will ever like you.

Anyone who has avoided all forms of social interaction with any pubescent girl over the past few years is probably wondering what all this Twilight/New Moon nonsense is about. Essentially, a vegetarian vampire with no personality falls in love with a helpless teenager with even less personality.

The actors in the film portray their cardboard roles to the tee, and I wasn’t really sure whether this was a good or bad thing. They certainly had very little to work with, and even though both characters have an emotional range of somewhere between 0 and -1, I couldn’t help but get the sense that the poor guys were really trying to bring the best out of it. Talk to anyone and they’ll tell you Kristen Stewart (who plays helpless teenager, Bella) has the depth of a paperclip, but for some reason I found her fascinating. In my eyes, she was a good choice for the role – but whether she could possibly portray any sense of happiness is beyond me. Robert Pattinson, on the other hand, depicts the drifty, mind-in-another-place persona attached to the character of vampire Edward quite well. Honestly, I haven’t quite caught the appeal of falling in love with a guy that has the motive and means to kill you at any second, but then again I’m not a 14 year old girl.

You will see a lot of man-nipples in this film.

So, what to say about the soundtrack? The orchestral compositions were reasonable to say the least, but I think the biggest eye-catcher here is the $19.99 soundtrack itself. Like the first film’s CD, it appears that many of the songs present hold little affiliation with the film, but will no doubt spur an entire horde of young girls to claim obsession with the bands within, resulting in concerts and festivals overrun with the screaming, vicious crowds of young girls.

You're about to get CULLEN'D!

In the end, it’s hard to put my finger on exactly what makes New Moon a bad film. The story is bland, but not terrible; the acting is blander, but still understandable; the soundtrack is alright and the direction is just fine. Whether it’s the overwhelming fan service or frightening fan-base, something seems awfully off. What New Moon and indeed the Twilight series as a whole appears to stand for, is a subpar franchise that gained staggering support by a legion of girls who found its escapist world comforting.

I don’t like to put a rating to my reviews for a few reasons – I think it devalues the thought processes put into writing the actual review, and I figure if I put a score on then everyone’s going to skip over just to see what I gave it. Nonetheless, purely out of convenience, I give New Moon a 2 out of 5. It certainly wasn’t as terrible as I expected, but it is still most definitely a mediocre film that doesn’t do anything horribly wrong, but fails to do anything particularly right either.

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