The Twilight series is a strange beast. People take it so seriously that they stich together felt representations of Bella’s womb from the third book (google it, seriously), but when you go to see it in theatres, scenes that were meant to be dramatic and suspenseful are met with not just a little laughter from around the room. Has New Moon turned the Twilight series into a parody of itself?
Many reviews, including io9.com’s, put forward that idea. The film has many of these moments: the speech where a friend of Bella’s decries another film for trying to think it’s deep because it uses metaphors; how Jacob (Tyler Lautner)’s prevalance for whipping off his shirt is accompanied by a grin that tells the audience that he knows what film he’s in; and one of the werewolves (who are all depicted by Natives) lampshades the film’s subtle racism by telling pale-white-guy-phile Bella that she “isn’t brown enough” to hang out with them, you wonder whether or not screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, a producer for Dexter, intended to make fun of the franchise in one of the films itself.
However, the moments of hilarity do not cover for boring plot movement and terrible scenes of stilted dialogue. I almost think it’s more realistic that (hypothetically) this script, with an existing text to adapt and enough of a following to ensure scads of money no matter what, may have been a lazy sunday for an easy paycheque for someone like Rosenberg. Every time there is a terrible scene of monosyllabic dialogue with less chemistry than a sterilized table, I imagine that it’s 3:30 PM and the writer just thought “You know, I could be out of here by 4 if I just finish that scene.”
It’s still a Twilight movie, and it retains the problems of the original; terrible cinematography, the fact that Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson together make the least attractive screen couple in recent memory, and a patent disdain for every vampire narrative to precede it for hundreds of years. Fourteen-year-olds are still encouraged to discard their eternal soul (seriously!) for a high-school boyfriend. Bella Swan is still the textbook example of a Mary Sue character–a character inserted by the author who is loved by everyone and is artificially unique and interesting as a form of wish fulfilment (which may be why so many teen girls like it). Bella does absolutely nothing for the whole film that makes her worth anyone’s sympathy; except when she softens up around Jacob, making promises to stay by him that vanish the moment that beanpole Edward returns from his film-long absence. It still brute forces a metaphor about celibacy through vampirism and emphasizes female subservience in gender roles; Bella is patently unable to defend herself and even after Edward treats her like dirt and leaves “forever”, her attempts to be reckless are always stopped by an apparition of Edward.
But it’s not as ostentatious as the last entry–there is no vampire baseball, although Dragon-Ball-Z style blurry-battle-CG injects the vampire/werewolf fights with hilarity. Nobody flies around the world twice to make a point, although this film features Bella getting into a motorbike crash at speed and cliffjumping a hundred feet at least, sustaining a concussion, and recieving no real injury to speak of. It relies more on its actors, which is a mistake; the film illustrates breakup pain that feels like a hole in the chest by having Bella writh in her bed screaming at the top of her lungs months and months after he left (The draft script calls for the room to “fill with black liquid” at that point, but that was too much even for this film).
The best part is the film that the characters go to see; a action send-up called Face Punch with hilariously hammy dialogue. Other than that, though, even the parody value of this film is not worth it. See this film if you like pain or want to inflict it on others; send friends to this film as punishment or donate to charity to guilt them to it. But if you want to get any enjoyment of it–even Bad Movie Night enjoyment–abandon that prospect, for it is as bleak as the film’s colour pallette.
This article was written for the Phoenix Newspaper, and it is not relased under any sort of Creative Commons license.
Somebody’s bombing the moon, and nobody even thought to invite a supervillain.
