Twilight: New Moon

by Verena Kyratzes

[scrippet]EXT. THE INTERNET – NIGHT

JONAS and VERENA are talking in your head.

JONAS
I’m not sure whether it’s really a good idea to start with the Twilight review. I mean, it’s really funny, but we made this big point that Commentarium isn’t about hating movies, it’s about loving them, about being analytical and interesting and… I don’t know, it feels too easy.

VERENA
It’s not easy at all! I had to watch this movie.[/scrippet]

To get it out of the way: No, I haven’t seen the first one, and I haven’t read the books, either. Still, I dare feel qualified to say something on the subject. Should you disagree, please take your disagreement somewhere else.

Backstory: A while ago, driven by scientific curiosity and nothing else to do, a friend and I watched Twilight: New Moon.

The results were as follows:

1. We managed to lose 130 unrecoverable minutes of our young lives.
2. A movie doesn’t need to look bad to be bad.
3. I still think that Robert Pattinson got hit in the face with a baseball bat when he was a kid. It’s really the only explanation.

*deep breath*

It’s sad how good this movie looks. Good in the sense of sets, costumes, photography; not werewolves. A lot of money went into Twilight: New Moon, and it’s easy to see that. In a world where I all too often leave the cinema wondering where the hell they put the millions of dollars that they spent on the damn movie, I cannot fault Twilight for its look. For a lot of other things maybe – like, say, existing – but not for its look.

So, you may ask, what’s my problem with Twilight? It’s so nice and romantic and Christian. Well, I might answer, that’s my problem right there.

I love romance. Give me a good romance over the latest Tarantino any day of the week. But Twilight is doing it all wrong. I like romance with intelligent protagonists, for one, and so should you. Watch Last Chance Harvey, for example. That would be a much better way to spend your time and money. Why? Because Twilight‘s Bella Swan is so stupid I want to hold her head down in the toilet until she stops struggling.

*another deep breath*

Here’s this girl. She’s seventeen. She is, to put it mildly, a moron. Fairly at the beginning of the movie her boyfriend, Edward Strangely-Caved-In-Nose Cullen, leaves her. He says it’s because he doesn’t love her, but he actually means that he’d better leave before his relatives come up with the idea of having her as a midnight snack. They have this conversation in a dark, menacing wood, because if they were to have it out in the open Edward would sparkle, which would destroy any last semblance of seriousness  this scene might have. (I mean, Lord, they sparkle. How can anyone read, watch or even contemplate that with a straight face? And the visual effect doesn’t look good, either.)

To cut the next (felt) three hours short: Bella believes him, falls to the floor in agony, is recovered from the forest by Your Friendly Neighborhood Werewolf and mopes for about seventeen years. Then, because you can only watch Kristen Steward mope for so long, she decides that she should maybe take a shower and rejoin society. The movie has lost all appeal by now, because with Robert Pattinson, however weird he may look, the only talented actor amongst the protagonists has left the scene. And we still have about ten hours of movie ahead of us. Will the fun never end?

Well, maybe not, for here comes the good part. Once all this has happened, she finds out that Edward will speak to her if she gets herself into physical danger. With “speak” I mean he will appear very shortly, say that she’s being overly daft and then vanish if someone so as much sneezes in his general direction. Okay. Whatever floats your boat. I’d go for something a little more permanent, not to say interactive.

So she needs adrenaline to make her runaway boyfriend appear, and what does young, brilliant Bella come up with? Bungee jumping? Reckless driving in her car? Taking IQ tests? Maybe something as wildly irrational as trying to track Edward down and talking to him? No. Perish the thought. She decides that what she really needs is to fix up two (not one) motorcycles from the scrapyard with her pal Jacob. Which will take her about half a year, judging from the endless montages devoted to the subject. So, to summarize: She’s perfectly willing to risk life and limb to see Edward, no matter how briefly, but, all suicidal tendencies aside, it’s okay to wait a few months before seeing him. As I said: whatever floats your boat, Bella-baby.

Of course we, the viewers, know what will happen from the moment we first see Jacob’s muscle-studded biceps, which the movie shamelessly shows us at every single opportunity it gets. Soon Edward isn’t so interesting anymore and Jacob is beginning to look juicy. Only, just as Bella is ready to admit that in the absence of her favorite bloodsucking fiend, Jacob might do at a pinch, he transforms into a werewolf.

Not any werewolf, mind you. Jacob joins the Trouser Gang. The Trouser Gang is a group of five young, muscle-packed men, who all belong to a local native tribe (because natives are mysterious, get it?) and who all buy their clothing from the local mysterious native men’s outfitter, who happens to carry nothing but trousers and sneakers. Oh, and they’re as big as plough horses and real cuddly.

So Jacob’s gone too, and more moping and not showering ensues.

One would think that the movie would go on for quite a while after this point (and it certainly felt that way), but I get the impression that the screenwriter suddenly realized that there is only so much pointless drivel you can pack into a script and that she needed to come to a point soon.

So Bella finds out what’s wrong with Jacob (slight case of lycanthropy, nothing serious), almost-but-not-quite snogs him half a dozen times, and then, lo and behold, Edward’s sister Alice makes an appearance.

She thought Bella was dead, an easy enough mistake to make given the creepily bad special effects shot in the scene before, and has come to check up on the funeral arrangements. They talk, Jacob comes in and interrupts, Alice leaves for a bit, wolf and moron almost kiss and then Edward calls just in time to say that he’s going to off himself now because Bella’s dead, which she isn’t.

Bella, still not getting it, races to Italy with Alice to stop Edward from killing himself, because, like, Alice couldn’t possibly do that on her own. And that’s about it.  Edward doesn’t kill himself and Bella is absolutely amazed to learn that he still loves her. Also he takes his shirt off, making several females in the auditorium faint. (Anything that takes the focus off the head.) Dakota Fanning is in there somewhere, ruining what’s left of her career in a ridiculous goth outfit, but besides a lot of slow-mo fight sequences between the Cullens and some Italian vampire dudes who have yet to realize that the Renaissance is over, not much happens. Slow motion fight sequences should be forbidden, by the way. They get used far too much.

So. Morons galore. Talk of suicide and plenty of eyeliner. Werewolves the size of elephants. Far too much slow motion. Long, meaningful looks. No premarital sex. And, to top it all off, offensive black vampires (ridiculous accent and rastas) and funny timid boys. What’s not to like?

Twilight has captured the imagination of millions of young girls. 17 million copies worldwide. That’s not bad in a society where most people only pick up a book if forced to do so at gunpoint.

If you wonder why that is so, try to think of another series of books that’s exclusively aimed at young, fantasy-phile females. Sure, Twilight clones have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain in recent years, but before that there wasn’t much. Plenty for younger kids and plenty for boys, but we girls were largely left out of the fun.

I suppose it’s good that something has come up that might keep that particular demographic interested in books during adolescence (and I successfully made myself feel a hundred years old by writing that). But why in god’s name couldn’t it have been something better-written?

I’ll see, once I have regained my strength, about seeing the first one, just for the sake of completion. Maybe that’s going to be more coherent, although I doubt it. Oh, the things we do for science…

Interesting links:

• IMDb entry
• Robert Pattinson Naked (sort of)
• TwilightSucks.com
• Wikipedia entry about the novels