I am not a fan of Romeo and Juliet. I suppose this means that I’m
not much of a romantic, though I frankly don’t see what’s so
swoonworthy about committing suicide in the wake of a loved one’s death.
Especially when you’ve only known that person for a short period of
time. In any case, I think the more romantic thing is to find a way of
honoring the life of the one who has been lost. The only thing that
makes Romeo and Juliet bearable for me is that the desperate
actions of these two silly teenagers lead to the end of an equally silly
feud between their families.
New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight
movie series, makes the allusions to this Shakespeare tragedy apparent
by showing Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart)
watching a movie version in class and discussing it. Within the first
ten minutes of the movie, Edward starts in with the morbid talk,
confessing how jealous he is of Romeo’s fragility. He comes right out
and announces that if Bella ever dies - which she eventually will, as
her birthday reminds her, since he steadfastly refuses to transform her
into a vampire like him - he will kill himself.
Perhaps I
should give him a break, since he’s lived more than a century and some
world-weariness is bound to set in. But Edward has half a dozen people
who care deeply about him, so it’s just as selfish for him to consider
taking his own life as it would be for Bella, especially knowing that
virtually the only way it could be done would be to go to the Volturi,
the governing body of vampires to reside in Italy, and request that they
tear him limb from limb, a pretty gruesome image for the rest of the
Cullens to have to live with. But then when one is in love, there is a
tendency to do things that don’t make a lot of sense, including tossing
away life in the midst of despair.
There’s a lot of despair in New Moon,
making it easily the hardest of the books for me to get through. The
movie retains plenty of that, but it’s a little more tolerable, since we
don’t have to put up with chapter after chapter of Bella’s morose
narration. Most of the voiceovers we do get are in the form of e-mails
Bella writes to Edward’s “sister,” Alice, my favorite character in the
series. Although Bella isn’t actually sending them out, the very fact
that she is framing these thoughts as writing to a friend - and such a
relentlessly cheerful one at that - instead of wallowing in self-pity in
complete isolation gives her musings a hopeful edge.
New Moon takes place three or four months after the conclusion of Twilight.
Edward and Bella have spent every spare summer moment in each other’s
company, often with Alice in tow, and now a new school year - Bella’s
senior year - has begun. With it comes Bella’s birthday, which makes her
despondent, since it means that she will now be older than Edward.
Bella’s dad Charlie (Billy Burke) ribs her about her unsettled response
to aging, as does Edward, while Alice is just overjoyed to be able to
throw a birthday party for someone.
Bella’s misgivings about
this plan stem from her own aversion to growing older, but it’s soon
apparent that a birthday party in a house full of vampires is
inadvisable for other reasons. A minor mishap leaves Bella bleeding and
nearly lunch for Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), who hasn’t quite mastered
the ability to control himself around human blood. It’s enough to
convince Edward that she is fundamentally unsafe in his company, so he
leaves, icily informing her that the family will be moving on, that she
isn’t invited to join them and that she will never hear from them again.
The bulk of the movie involves Bella gradually moving away
from her soul-deadened state. At first she moves through her days on
auto-pilot, and night terrors torture her - and frighten her concerned
dad - when the sun goes down. Still, somewhere deep down, she clings to
the thought that Edward and Alice, who she misses nearly as much, will
return one day. So when Charlie tells her he thinks she should move to
Jacksonville to be with her mother and get away from the environment
associated with so much sadness, she realizes that she needs to snap out
of it if she ever wants to see them again.
On an outing with
bubble-headed frenemy Jessica (Anna Kendrick), she discovers that when
she is in a dangerous situation, Edward appears to her. Whether it’s
just a product of her own imagination matters little, so deep is her
craving for just the tiniest hint of Edward. This leads her to
motorcycle mechanic Jacob (Taylor Lautner), the family friend who is as
warm and jovial as Edward is cold and stiff. Lautner bulked up quite
noticeably between the first two movies. There was talk of replacing the
actor because he didn’t seem grown-up enough, but Lautner proves his
mettle here in a performance that allows him to be both vulnerable and
masculine while balancing his love for Bella with his strange new
brotherhood with other members of the Quileute tribe. Like LOST’s
Sawyer, he has a habit of taking his shirt off at every opportunity,
and he’s got the muscles and the tan to pull it off. When Edward’s shirt
comes off after we finally see him again toward the end of the movie,
it’s not such a pretty sight.
This movie switches directors to
Chris Weitz, which changes the tone a bit. In some cases, that’s good.
For instance, the green-tinted scenery problem of Twilight is not
present here; the cinematography looks much more natural, except during
the action sequences, and then the special effects look pretty cheesy.
Sadly, the sound mixing is, if anything, even worse in this second
movie; not only does the music drown out the dialogue, but so do
rainstorms and other ambient sounds. I wish I’d had the subtitles on
because I know I missed a few things.
Speaking of which, my
parents, whose knowledge of the books is limited to what little I’ve
told them, frequently found the movie confusing, and I had to explain
plot points to them. This suggests to me that the screenplay did not do a
very good job of laying things out for those who don’t have book
knowledge to help them connect the dots. And as in the book, the
misunderstanding that precipitates Edward’s decision to seek out the
Volturi is a pretty flimsy thing to hang the climax on. Additionally,
while the violence is still pretty limited, there is a bit more of it
than in the first movie.
On the plus side, we get a lot more
of Alice in this movie, even if Ashley Greene still is only on the
screen for maybe a quarter of the movie. This funky, effervescent
counterpoint to all of Bella and Edward’s brooding just makes me smile
every time she appears, even when she makes a couple of less than
gracious remarks about Jacob, whose tribe has long been at odds with
vampires. Just the device of Bella’s imaginary correspondence brings
Alice’s character into greater prominence, which I appreciated.
I
continued to enjoy Burke’s performance as the gruff but doting Charlie
and, despite the brevity of his scenes, quickly grew fond of The Red Green Show’s
Graham Greene’s chummy Harry Clearwater, one of Charlie’s closest
friends. I also liked the introduction of Michael Sheen as the
intriguing Aro, the member of the Volturi who does the most talking in
the electrifying scene in which Edward, Bella and Alice have a private
audience with them. He’s charming and has a giddy quality about him that
almost reminds me of Arthur Weasley, Ron’s Muggle-loving dad in the
Harry Potter series, but there’s also something deeply dangerous about
him, as we see most plainly in an almost blink-and-you-miss-it scene
that marks the conclusion of Bella’s whirlwind trip to Italy.
In retrospect, I tend to think of the first two books in this series
largely as set-up for the last two, which I find much more compelling
and less self-involved from Bella’s perspective. I don’t find Bella
quite as insufferable in the movie version of New Moon, largely
because there’s just not nearly as much time for her to moan about the
heart-shaped hole in her chest. The movie only squeezes in two or three
references in comparison to the book’s dozens of mentions. By the same
token, while she still turns into a bit of an adrenaline junkie in the
movie, she only does three really dangerous things before Alice shows up
at her door to find out whether the suicide she thought she saw in one
of her visions was actually true. So she’s easier to put up with here,
though I still find her annoying.
Ultimately, I think I would
mostly agree with my dad, who said he didn’t like the second movie as
much as the first, but I did like it better than the book, and I think
it sets us up nicely for the more interesting story to come in the
third. I’m ready when you are, Netflix...
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