Team Edward or Team Jacob? After watching “New Moon,” I don’t know how anyone can decide.
Yes, I will admit that I am a Twilight fan, but I thought the first movie was terrible. Robert Pattinson somehow made a pasty vampire look sexy, and made the movie a little bit easier to watch. But when I heard that New Moon was coming out with a new director, Chris Weitz, I was thrilled.
New Moon wasn’t disappointing. Granted, it was cheesy and the animated werewolves were less than believable, but you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got. And to film a movie based on a vampire series (that is also cheesy) is not going to win you an Oscar. But it can still be decent, which New Moon was.
Kristen Stewart’s performance (as Bella) was better than I expected – while I had anticipated her to be clenching her stomach for the entire duration of the movie because of Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) absence, that wasn’t the main focus. She seemed a little more realistic, albeit slightly crazy, in New Moon, but it was easier to watch than the first movie.
And of course, Taylor Lautner added a whole new dimension to the movie as Jacob’s character became more prominent. I have to say, Lautner was great – the emotion was there and the believability, at least, when he was human and not a werewolf. I went to see the movie with one of my friends, who couldn’t help but laugh every time one of the characters morphed into wolf form. The animation was ok, but it definitely could have been way better. The whole point should have been to make the werewolves seem more believable, which they were not at all.
The movie was long, almost two hours, but it didn’t drag along like I thought it might. There was enough plot and/or action to keep the movie going up until the last action-packed scene with the Volturi in Italy. The scene was filmed as close to the book as I can remember, and equally creepy.
Of course, it wasn’t hard to keep watching with the likes of Jacob Lautner and Robert Pattinson walking around shirtless, but the acting was there to hold it together. It was believable enough for what it was, and the ending leaves you hanging – even I had forgetten what happened at the end of New Moon, and the film closed out in the perfect spot.
So judge me if you will, but Weitz did a great job of salvaging the Twilight movie series after the botched Twilight, and I’m hoping Eclipse will be just as good when it comes out on June 30.
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