News: GotchaMovies Movie Review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon: An Alternate Take
posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 - 12:00:00 AM
After having been dragged to a showing of the first Twilight by an ex-girlfriend, I wasn’t expecting anything…oh what’s the phrase…“not absolutely terrible”. To my utter and complete lack of surprise, New Moon was just as bad as the original, and even possibly worse. There’s no thrill of discovering something new and dangerous, just boring “Everything is Okay When You’re in Love” slop we’ve seen in a million other movies made for women whose guilty pleasure is apparently a world without feminism.
But saying Twilight is bad is like saying Nazis are evil and Steve Buscemi is ugly. It’s so obvious it’s become something of a cliché. Criticizing New Moon wouldn’t be like shooting fish in a barrel, it would be like shooting a Beluga whale shoved into a tiny, tiny bucket. It wouldn’t be like hitting the broadside of a barn, it would be like hitting the broad side of a barn the size of the planet Uranus that I’m literally already touching.
It is easy to criticize something that’s terrible, and a real challenge to defend it. So I’m going to do something a little weird: I’m going to pretend that New Moon was a much better movie; I am going to give it far more credit than it deserves. So humor me and please do not think for a moment that I seriously believe that this movie is anything but the worst of the worst.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon picks up the romance between Isabella “Bella” Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) where the first movie left off. The story takes a turn for the tragic when Edward leaves Bella, ostensibly to protect her, but it is obvious that he has outgrown Stewart (who, let’s remember, is 90 years his junior). I’ve heard many fans of the series claim that Edward’s intentions were genuine, and he was terrified of losing Bella. If this were true, where was that emotion in Pattinson’s performance? Every line seemed painfully delivered not from behind an aching heart, but a smirk. Bella is obviously a plaything with whom things have become much too serious.
For the remainder of the movie, Stewart pulls of a compelling performance of a deeply, tragically deluded young woman. One that, like so many before her, had bought into the secular American religion of “True Love”: a love that comes immediately and easily—not as the result of any effort or true trials or commitment. In Edward, Bella had received exactly what she wanted and exactly what she did not need: a literal magical prince. When he leaves, we see her desperately groping to find some new fairy prince to fill her life and keep her from having to confront that fact that we all have to face eventually: that we all are individually responsible for our own spiritual happiness, and it is a process that takes work. While everyone else was out getting their hearts broken and romantic preconceptions shattered, Bella’s were being reinforced in the most dangerous way possible.
We see her grope madly at her best friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), and only becomes truly interested in him romantically when she finds out that he too is some sort of supernatural creature (in this case, a werewolf). But even then Jacob, who is clearly a better match for her than Edward, offers only stability and a warm calming comfort. In him, Bella sees the eventual destruction of her romantic beliefs, which she clings to even as they destroy her relationship with her friends, her father, and everyone around her. When, halfway through the movie, Bella seems to be recovering from the loss of Edward and embarking on a more healthy and mature relationship with Jacob, she suddenly and inexplicably tries to kill herself. This seems jarring and out of place until you realize that romanticism and perpetual childhood have become such an engrained part of Bella’s personality that maturity and realism are absolute anathema to her.
Vampirisim and Lycanthropy in Twilight are often cited as symbols of the fear that adolescents face as they enter adulthood. It is my belief that they are meant instead to represent the vestiges of magical childhood thinking, and the obviously confounded and delusional Bella is a tragic example of what happens when we refuse to let them go. Though the allegory is double-folded in some areas, such as when Jacob’s Lycanthropy is used as a sophisticated metaphor for homoeroticism. Jacob painfully explains that he cannot be with Bella anymore, and that he cannot explain why, afterward going of to romp shirtless in the forest with a group of older men. “This is not a lifestyle choice” he tearfully proclaims later when explaining his affliction to Bella, “This is something I was born with.”
Sitting in a theater filled, inexplicably, with middle-aged women, I found New Moon a lot easier to swallow when viewed through this lens. At times it was almost moving. Bella as a tragic, destructive romantic, Jacob as a confused proto-homosexual, Edward as the mincing, experienced older man, able to easily toy with Bella’s emotions, Bella’s father as a father who unconditionally loves a daughter who would casually throw him to the wolves for the sake of her own romantic fantasies. I lost track of the number of times in the movie someone asked Bella to do something “For Charlie (her father)” but I didn’t lose count of the number of times she listened because it’s hard to lose count of zero things.
I watch a lot of movies in a given month, and many of those are down right terrible. Very few of them ever induce physical pain and unease, but somehow New Moon succeeded where the worst of the worst had failed. It is fun to toy with the idea that there is more going on beneath the surface and we’re all just missing a great masterpiece. It teaches us something about the subjectivity and the context-dependence of art. If I can defend Twilight, who’s to say what’s a good movie and what’s a bad movie anymore? But by every measure you can imagine, except for possibly “polish”, this is one of the worst movies of the year. Seriously don’t see it, don’t encourage your friends to see it. And maybe next time someone says they enjoy Twilight because it’s “fun” and “entertaining” tell them they can come up with a better defense than that.
This The Twilight Saga: New Moon review is part 2 of a 3 part perspectives review. Read the first perspective here and the third one here.
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