New Moon (2009)

(L-R)Peter Facinelli, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz
Watch the New Moon trailer

Writer: Melissa Rosenberg, Stepheine Mayer (book)

Director: Chris 'career highlight came with only decent work, About A Boy, in 2002' Weitz

Notable actors: Michael Sheen, Peter Facinelli, Robert Pattinson

How this made a lengthy book is beyond me (I refuse to degrade the art from by referring to it as a novel). The important thing to note in New Moon is that there’s no story. Just two hours or so at finding excuses – or, as is more often the case, not bothering at all – to have the two male leads take their tops off.

I realise I am far away from Twilight’s audience. I’m not a teenager, I’m not a girl, I’m not a moron, and I appreciate talent in acting, writing; anything creative really. I’ll stop with the insults now, my apologies. If this was just another banal come-and-go series I could put up with it. What incenses me, and many others, is the way Twilight’s misguided fans hold it to some great literary tragedy, not realising the story is the same Shakespeare cobbled together all those years ago.

You know the one – paedophilic guy preying on a young lady, but it’s fine because it’s so gosh darn romantic. Whoops, my apologies, again. I should have said romantic. Twilight’s premise is downright creepy, especially considering all the religious things thrown in there. As if a guy who would be seventeen forever would ever turn down sex. With anyone. Most would say yes to a squirrel, if my memory of the tortured time serves well.

Nevertheless, I’ve been trying to be a good brother and understand my baby sister’s obsession. I saw Twilight in the cinema and was unimpressed in a mildly irritating sort of way, then it blew up and wood was served as talent to the children of western nations. I was completely and unashamedly biased sitting down to watch New Moon, but, sad to say, I was disappointed.

Robert Pattinson can act. Taylor Lautner may be able to scrape by on American sitcoms yet, but he needs a few years at drama school first. Kristen Stewart is beyond hope, while Peter Facinelli and Michael Sheen were fabulous, and it was most definitely a case of paycheck for one and doing-it-for-the-kids for the other. Michael Sheen’s moment as the head of the Volturi was terrifying.

This film is not made for me. It’s made for me, and men like me, to be dragged to by sisters, girlfriends, and that best friend you’ve had since childhood and just can’t gather the courage to risk the friendship by telling her you love her. All the same, it’s nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be. Yeah, it’s bad, but not outright bad in the way many films aimed at the target audience I do sit squarely in are.

I can quite easily imagine, if I were a fifteen-year-old hormonal girl, that I’d swoon understandably for a series containing countless shirtless men balanced perfectly with over-the-top romanticism. So, try as I might, I can’t really insult Twilight; not as a film in its own right, because the truth is that it does the job it was designed for perfectly well. And I’m sure the next one, or however many there continue to be, will do so equally well.  Me not being a target audience doesn’t make it a bad movie. Even casting a plank as the lead doesn’t make it bad movie, try as I might to wish both those things true.

The truth is that films like Twilight is the reason popcorn in the cinema caught on; so the boys have something to do while just being content the one they love is enjoying the screen immensely. If not a little too much. Oh, and Robert Pattinson really can act, I wasn’t taking the piss. It shows across sometimes even through the fog of long-repressed-vampiric hormones. That was the most shocking thing of all. Well, that and the fact small children now believe vampires fucking sparkle.