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#3 - The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Chris Weitz, 2009
A teenage human must cope not only with her vampire boyfriend suddenly abandoning her but also with the romantic tension between her and her childhood friend.
The original Twilight film wasn't that terrible. It wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but I couldn't get nearly as worked up about it as the average hater did back in the day. At the very least, the film's blend of paranormal melodrama and gloomy monster mayhem was a little entertaining and exceeded my expectations. However, there was nothing that suggested a serious need to see any of the sequels, and actually watching second film New Moon (while thinking that it'd put me to sleep, no less) definitely bore that out. While the original film worked well enough as a stand-alone story, the sequel definitely suffers as it becomes the type of sequel that exists mainly to develop a series-wide narrative but isn't good in its own right. It's a shame, because there are some promising elements at work here. Having already spent the first installment establishing the romance between human Bella (Kristen Stewart) and vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), the series takes an interesting left turn when a vampire party gets a little out of hand and leads Edward to distance himself from Bella. This sinks her into a deep depression and causes her to pursue anything that will either bring Edward and his family back or at least chase away the numbness she feels; this does end up leaving her vulnerable to the largely unrequited attentions of her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who is hiding a secret of his own...
Unfortunately, that potential really doesn't hold up in the face of the rest of the film. Some new elements (such as Edward's ability to appear to Bella in the form of an astral projection) are pretty ridiculous in their own right due to combinations of narrative inconsistency and poorly-executed effects work. That's without counting the ways in which the film does start to get bogged down in its main plot, which primarily consists of Bella hanging around her small town with friends and occasionally becoming privy to certain truths involving the local Native American population; while this does make the film veer into potentially interesting territory, it never makes the most of it. Even when the film starts building a major conflict involving the members of an evil vampire cult, it still falls short due to pacing problems involving the balance of plot progression and character development. The weaknesses in the characterisation naturally influence the acting for the worse as performers do tend to be passable at best. While New Moon did have moments that suggested some small degree of substance underneath its rather trite-looking surface, any appeal peters out and is virtually forgotten by the time that the credits roll. At the rate things are going, I'll probably end up seeing the rest of the films - maybe once I'm done, I'll figure out why I did.
Chris Weitz, 2009
A teenage human must cope not only with her vampire boyfriend suddenly abandoning her but also with the romantic tension between her and her childhood friend.
The original Twilight film wasn't that terrible. It wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but I couldn't get nearly as worked up about it as the average hater did back in the day. At the very least, the film's blend of paranormal melodrama and gloomy monster mayhem was a little entertaining and exceeded my expectations. However, there was nothing that suggested a serious need to see any of the sequels, and actually watching second film New Moon (while thinking that it'd put me to sleep, no less) definitely bore that out. While the original film worked well enough as a stand-alone story, the sequel definitely suffers as it becomes the type of sequel that exists mainly to develop a series-wide narrative but isn't good in its own right. It's a shame, because there are some promising elements at work here. Having already spent the first installment establishing the romance between human Bella (Kristen Stewart) and vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson), the series takes an interesting left turn when a vampire party gets a little out of hand and leads Edward to distance himself from Bella. This sinks her into a deep depression and causes her to pursue anything that will either bring Edward and his family back or at least chase away the numbness she feels; this does end up leaving her vulnerable to the largely unrequited attentions of her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who is hiding a secret of his own...
Unfortunately, that potential really doesn't hold up in the face of the rest of the film. Some new elements (such as Edward's ability to appear to Bella in the form of an astral projection) are pretty ridiculous in their own right due to combinations of narrative inconsistency and poorly-executed effects work. That's without counting the ways in which the film does start to get bogged down in its main plot, which primarily consists of Bella hanging around her small town with friends and occasionally becoming privy to certain truths involving the local Native American population; while this does make the film veer into potentially interesting territory, it never makes the most of it. Even when the film starts building a major conflict involving the members of an evil vampire cult, it still falls short due to pacing problems involving the balance of plot progression and character development. The weaknesses in the characterisation naturally influence the acting for the worse as performers do tend to be passable at best. While New Moon did have moments that suggested some small degree of substance underneath its rather trite-looking surface, any appeal peters out and is virtually forgotten by the time that the credits roll. At the rate things are going, I'll probably end up seeing the rest of the films - maybe once I'm done, I'll figure out why I did.