Twilight: New Moon--A Review

Last night, I rented Twilight: New Moon and watched it with my mom. It was . . . long. And pretty boring. But it did give us plenty of opportunities to make cracks whenever a character took off his shirt. We could have made it a drinking game: take a shot every time you spy a bare pectoral!

The Twilight: New Moon poster.

I've mentioned before that I've read all of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books, and that I enjoyed them a little too much. Her writing is terrible, her characters are shallow, and her plots are predictable at best and downright silly at worst. But they're also fun: Meyer can entertain an audience nearly indefinitely, dragging out her frivolous storylines and serious sexual tension for thousands of pages. I wouldn't read the books a second time, but they made for one great weekend's worth of reading!

What the Twilight movies miss is just that: fun. They're long (both films run a little over two hours) and exhaustive (they include every minor detail from the novels, necessary or not) and relentlessly serious. Their color palette is muted--all blacks, browns, and silvers, with occasional dashes of red and yellow--and their soundtracks are painfully emo. (I'm not saying that the music is bad, mind you, just very angsty teenager.) The movies show no sense of humor at all. Instead of a gentle awareness of Twilight's innate camp, we get a lot of awkward, twitchy teenage conversations; yearning half-kisses; and lovelorn staring.

 Teenage Bella being moody, missing Edward, and thinking about how all grownups are phony.

While watching New Moon, I couldn't help but wonder where Stephanie Meyer's deliciously silly, hyper-romantic, super-dramatic cheese-fest sensibility has disappeared to? Why is New Moon a meditation on teenage depression instead of a thrill ride of yearning and vampire make-out sessions and unnecessarily frequent werewolf fights?

The only thing that the movies get right is that everyone is incredibly good looking. In the books, the main characters are blatantly shallow, and that blandness if effective if not entirely purposeful: their vapidness allows a reader to imagine herself in Bella's generic little sneakers and imagine her own tasty versions of Edward (the vampire boyfriend) and Jacob (the werewolf boyfriend) to vicariously lust after.

The casting directors have done a great job of choosing attractive young actors who are capable but not too interesting: Bella (Kristen Stewart) is dull, likable, and very pretty; Edward (Robert Pattinson) is dreamy and has the deliciously tortured air of a pouty consumptive;  and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) combines a cute, boy-next-door sort of appeal with a whole heap of well-tanned muscles.

Battle of the beefcakes.

I think that the producers of the Twilight movies know that as long as they produce a set of four decently made movies full of pretty faces and meticulously accurate plotlines, teenage girls (and their mothers) (and 26-year-old bloggers) will show up for the spectacle. But I would have loved to see the filmmakers make Twilight their own, to make a movie with a little lightness, charm, and romance, maybe something with some rock music or characters with actual personalities. Then maybe their films would stand a chance of being watched twenty years down the road.

Instead, these filmmakers are happily raking in the cash by creating a suite of films whose expiration date seems to already have passed. Or will have passed just as soon as Robert Pattinson gets his first wrinkle or Taylor Lautner goes squishy around the waist.