The Red Circle

I’ve made a huge mistake.

I pre-emptively defended New Moon in my third Flip/Side column as the ridiculous garbage I had assumed it to be. While there are scenes of hilarious inanity, the majority of this film is a textbook sample of “How To Not Make a Film.” It’s an exercise in heavy-handedness in the face of nothingness. How a series so blank, unoriginal, and inept has set both literature and film records is confounding to say the least. The good news is that The Twilight Sags: New Moon isn’t the worst film of the year. The rest of the news is that is is undoubtedly the worst of the series, and quite possibly the laziest film to come out in ages. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (the bad movie world champion of 2009) at least aggressively hates its audience. New Moon is simply content to ignore them for two hours.

There is absolutely no story in New Moon, so I will attempt to sum up the best that I can. Bella Swan has turned 18 years old and, much like many girls her age, begins having nightmares of turning 70. At the party Edward, her ageless vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen throws for her, she gets a papercut and triggers an attack by one of their newly turned family members. Edward hurts Bella in his attempt to save her, and because of this situation, breaks up with her so his family can skip town.

Heartbroken, Bella turns to perpetually shirtless werewolf Jacob Black, her childhood friend, for comfort. They slowly begin a relationship which is cut short when she receives the news that Edward believes Bella is dead due to a misinterpretation of cliff diving, and is going to seek the Volturi’s (The vampire world’s “rulers,” as it were) permission to off himself. She races to Italy to save him. Those two paragraphs are the extent of what happens in New Moon, and somehow it manages to take up two hours and ten minutes of screen time.

Mostly, it manages by rambling. Plot points are brought up just to be dropped one scene later. The movie feels completely comprised of self-contained scenes placed one after another. It also feels like it was made of montages. As if the story itself weren’t completely uninteresting, Chris Weitz has decided to tell virtually the whole film in music-cued mashups of people doing things. Aside from an abominably shoehorned reference to Romeo and Juliet that provides Edward his arc for the rest of the film, there is not a single thread that connects the movie from beginning to end.

Cinema’s first rule is Show, Don’t Tell. The filmmakers have decided that this is a silly rule and fuck it very much. There is an interminable series of scenes that feature Bella reading her own emails to the audience as if finding a visual way to move the story along was just too much effort. Maybe Chris Weitz thought that the engorged effects budget was more of a challenge than an asset, and decided to render it as useless as possible. The middle of the film features a werewolf vs. werewolf fight that looks exactly like a reskinned version of the polar bear fight in Weitz’s The Golden Compass. It’s a throwaway sequence that does nothing to further the story (although to be fair, NOTHING in this movie seeks to further the story) and has absolutely no tension or weight behind it. This is a movie that has two giant wolves taking bites out of each other and manages to make it the blandest thing in town.

Perhaps the most glaring offense is the scene directly after Edward leaves Bella. She is sitting alone in her room staring blankly out of her window as the camera circles around her. With each pass, the view changes from kids running by in costumes, to the ground covered in leaves, to a snowscape. It’s a nice looking scene, but even a first time cinema viewer could recognize that this is simply a reference to the seasons passing by in her catatonic state. The film finds it necessary, however, to plaster “October, November and December” in order across Kristen Stewart’s head – just in case the blatantly obvious was too subtle for you. Chris Weitz, I am glad you’ve given up making movies. Apparently you’ve simply forgotten how.

Speaking of Stewart, why is she in these films? The character of Bella is a nightmare. I can’t imagine any actress wanting to play a character that so defiantly embodies a step backward for females in literature. Not only is Bella completely incapable of making decisions for herself, she is completely defined by the men in her life. There is not even one scene in the film where the character makes a decision that isn’t in service to one of the two male leads. If Stephen Meyer wrote this series, he would be run out of town for being a misogynist. Stephenie, however, can singlehandedly set back gender relations several decades and make a septillion dollars. No better is screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg. She thrusts Bella into every scene, filling the movie with an intensely unlikeable character. She alternates between cloying neediness and inconsolably depressed. This could have been the franchise’s Prisoner of Azkaban. There’s enough skeleton here to make the story cinematic and engaging – all it would take is a narrative (at all. Any kind) and a shift away from the word-for-word adaptation of the book. Regrettably, this would require a modicum of talent and drive. No one involved in the creative process of this movie had any.

She rejects all of the attention that her friends attempt to give her, relegating them to near cameo appearances in the film and in Bella’s life. If you are not Kristen Stewart, you are barely in this movie. I have never seen a second chapter in a franchise develop characters so poorly. Anna Kendrick gets about three scenes, none of them good. The rest of the crew introduced in the original (including the Cullens) are given about two scenes each, and about as many lines of dialogue.

Everything wrong with the planet in one convenient place.

The only other person who has any impact on the story is Taylor Lautner’s Jacob Black. He’s the rebound boy for Bella after Edward ditches her in the woods (in a fetal position no less). Out of anyone else in the film, Lautner has the most charisma. Damning praise, as the majority of the cast have about as much presence as a welfare Christmas. Taylor is fine here, and it’s that simple “okayness” that makes him the best part of the film. Despite his allergic reaction to cloth touching the upper half of his body, Lautner actually manages against the movie’s will to bring character to Jacob. He’s recently found out he turns into a werewolf (a stupid, cartoony, ridiculous werewolf) when he gets angry – and unlike Edward – tries to stay away from Bella so he can’t hurt her. Not running away once he does.

And that part of the film right there gives me the most amount of confusion and bile. This film is literally an allegory for sustaining an abusive relationship. In his attempt to place Bella out of harms way when she has her paper cut incident, he actually bats her across the room and sends her crashing into a glass table, cutting her worse.  After this, Edward in his guilt actually tells Bella that he doesn’t love her anymore, and he needs to go away. This sends Bella into a downward spiral of depression. Upon starting a relationship with Jake built on trust and common interests, she immediately cuts it off and runs back to Edward simply because he says he’s sorry. He even promises her that “He’ll never do it again.” It all comes down to the choice between the dangerous guy, and the comfortable guy. And this story tells a legion of young girls that it is okay to be with the man that hurts you (and gives up because the relationship has become a little uncomfortable), because it’s true love.

Maybe this review is coming across like there’s nothing good in this film. It’s because there isn’t.

Shockingly, the one exception that comes to mind is the soundtrack. It provides the backdrop for the incessant montaging and, if taken out of context with the rest of the film, it fits the scenes quite nicely. It’s more of the same emo-art-rock that dominates the college radio stations nowadays, but it never feels out of place like the scenes it accompanies do.

Aside from Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning hamming it up as members of the Volturi, there is nothing else about this film that even comes close to being memorable. The Volturi scene (and it is just one scene) is indicative of how the whole movie should have been handled: Silly. Michael Sheen plays the leader of the clan completely self-aware of how stupid it is. The same with Fanning. It’s too bad that they are the only ones in the group that are used to any effect. They cast Colossus, The weird looking singing girl/guy from Sweeney Todd, and even a 16 year old Cameron Bright to be in this movie, and they get to have no parts. They’ve even cast the guy who played Alastair on Supernatural, and instead of letting him emote in that brilliant way he did on the show, they’ve simply dressed him in flowy clothes and told him to be a bored asshole.

It’s truly astounding to see that this is what vampires have become in the 21st century. Robert Pattinson (who pretty much only appears for less than 30 minutes of the movie) manages to look even more ridiculous than he did in the first movie. Apparently being a vampire in the world of Twilight means that you douse yourself in baby powder, smear on some lipstick, and never show any emotion, ever. I don’t even want to imagine how many girls now think that pasty, pale, and distracted is now the model of manliness. On the upshot, it should help some clever pedophiles to get laid.

New Moon is an abject failure as a film. Its story is missing, its characters are thin and arcless, and its action and thriller segments fail any objective filmic tests. And yet, this movie now holds the single day box office record. It is now  a part of cinema history, and that is a sad, sad fact indeed. Along with the fact that a generation of girls are going to grow up into listless twenty-somethings that get smashed around by their meticulously coiffed boyfriends as a result of this movie, Hollywood is more than likely going to be churning out worse vampire romance films that appeal to even worse people.

New Moon is a movie for the converted. The squealing, ignorant throngs of people who insist that obsession is true love and that a story that has no plot, no development, and no characters that exist beyond one defining trait is one of the defining pieces of art of our times. If you are the type of person that prides themselves on the ability to completely fail at appreciating what an artistic statement is, then please, continue to make New Moon a massive success story.

I hope someone re-enacts Inglourious Basterds in your theater.

2.5 out of 10

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