Last year’s Twilight was a popular movie with a narrative problem: a second half where nothing happened. Once the mysterious Edward (Robert Pattinson) had revealed his true nature, and Bella (Kristen Stewart) loved him anyway, and Edward’s family accepted her, and Bella’s dad wasn’t even in the picture, there was no dramatic tension and no obvious reason for the film to continue (a skirmish with a rival band of vampires was clearly just a sub-plot) – especially since the next logical step (Edward and Bella having sex) was specifically ruled out by the film’s worldview. Twilight hit a dead-end, and might as well have padded out its running-time by having the cast play baseball – which in fact is exactly what it did.
Given that stalemate, New Moon – the inevitable sequel to Twilight – has no choice but to shift the parameters, but it’s still slightly sad to see Twilight turned into a franchise with the usual grandiloquent trimmings (it’s now a ‘Saga’, as per the title; a third instalment, Eclipse, has already been filmed and is due in 2010). The first film was grounded in reality – basically a teen drama with fantasy elements – but this new one appears to be set in a magical otherworld (Bella’s human school-friends seem out of place) full of monsters and transformations. It even takes our heroine away from her dull small-town home – where the skies are always grey, and the soundtrack always plays mopey emo dirges – and transports her to sunny Tuscany, where she plays a featured role in a kind of undead High Council (echoes of Interview With the Vampire) and discovers she may have powers of her own.
New Moon is clearly transitional – it ends on a cliffhanger – and also quite bitty, playing like two separate 50-minute films (maybe two episodes from some upcoming ‘Twilight: The TV Series’) plus half an hour of filler. It opens with a cautionary quote from Romeo and Juliet – “These violent delights have violent ends!” – and of course Edward and Bella’s romance is a tale of star-crossed lovers, albeit from different species as opposed to different families.
Daringly, the film presses the point by withholding its trump card – moody-looking Pattinson, whose iconic presence reaches male-model heights in the early scenes. He walks towards Bella in slow-motion, then watches her with tragic, bloodshot eyes. He recites Shakespeare, and the camera hones in as if glimpsing Truth in his sculpted cheekbones. A kiss from Edward is a major production (they can’t have sex, remember). And of course getting dumped by Edward is heartbreaking – which is what happens to our poor heroine, Edward giving her the brush-off and departing with his vampire family.
He does it for her own protection, of course – a rather hilarious early scene shows what can happen if you get a paper-cut in a room full of vampires – but it’s still a blow for the teeny-bopper crowd when Pattinson disappears for almost an hour. The film turns instead to Bella’s friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), which is where New Moon follows Twilight in revealing a strangely timid, scared-little-girl-ish subtext. Twilight was a semi-coded tract for abstinence and chastity, defined as “self-control” (“I can never lose control with you”) – while New Moon is all about fear of testosterone, and those beastly, frightening things known as boys. Jacob was always “a good kid” – but now he’s 16, and something’s changing. He starts hanging out with a tough crowd, all of them running in a pack with their shirts off. He starts getting wild and aggressive. It’s like there’s … a beast inside him – as Bella finds out when she slaps his face, provoking a fierce reaction.
I won’t say more, though I guess Twilight fans already know what I’m talking about. It’s notable, however, that Pattinson the actor is androgynous and Edward the character is far from macho: when he reappears fleetingly in the middle hour, it’s to warn Bella to be careful (“You promised me, nothing reckless!” he says, sounding more like an over-protective mother than a would-be lover). Twilight is a very feminine – or just feminized – saga, scripted by a woman based on a book by another woman, making it a welcome corrective to the warlike tone of (say) Lord of the Rings, let alone the adrenaline-junkie mentality of most action movies; probably the most violent thing Bella does in the whole film is switch off the radio when it plays yet another mopey emo dirge. New Moon is no more than watchable – it’s too fragmented to make much impact – and I’m not necessarily looking forward to Eclipse (there are too many franchises in Hollywood already), but it could be worse. Vampires have been used in everything from comedies to Westerns; I’m sure a bit of soppy Harlequin romance won’t kill them.
