New Moon: AWESOME

Let’s start by throwing up a blanket spoiler warning for all the Twilight books and movies. Then let’s add a disclaimer: I’ve only read the first of the Twilight books. After that I cheated by reading plot summaries of the other three, because I hated the writing and the sexism and the insistence on describing everyone’s cars in so much detail, but I did find the actual stories, well, kind of compelling, in a disturbing way.

All of which makes the two Twilight movies, thus far, pretty much perfect in my eyes. The new one – titled The Twilight Saga: New Moon for marketing purposes – would probably be better than the first, except that it is always less impressive when you see something done for the second time. The director from the original Twilight movie changed, but the screenwriter is still the same, and now I’m thinking she’s the one who should really get the credit for the movies’ awesome cheesiness, because the cheesiness, oh, the cheesiness. Both the Twilight movies, thus far, have taken the books’ inherently cheesy premise and presented it just as cheesily as it required. Only this time, they added werewolves.

They also, briefly, added a character who seemed like an actual human being, and even went so far as to imply that someday, Bella, our erstwhile heroine, might display signs of being an actual human being, too. I mean, obviously that’s never really going to happen, because watching Bella angst about her very inhuman problems is the whole point of The Twilight Saga. Although personally, that’s not what I like about the movies. I like the movies because you get to watch vampires throw each other into grand pianos and werewolves show off their six pack abs. Then you get to giggle gleefully at all the little hilarious moments you know the filmmakers have to have put in on purpose, even though they totally ruin the mood of the book. Like the flashfoward in the middle of the not-at-all-scary climax when Alice has a vision of Bella and Edward running through a field of butterflies, or whatever that was.

But the paranormal stuff isn’t the point of The Twilight Saga, either. You can tell from the way Stephenie Meyer made up her own convenient rules about all her paranormal creatures. Besides always being really hot, werewolves can wolf out at any time, regardless of the moon’s cycles, and vampires don’t sleep in coffins (in fact they don’t sleep at all – which gives them all the more free time for stalking (whoops, did I say “stalking”? I meant “wooing”)).

Because the real point of this story is simply that all the boys loooove plain little Bella, and that one very very special boy, who’s been alone for a hundred years because he never met a girl who was good enough for him, loves Bella bestest of all. And he’s so special he and Bella get to be together forever and ever, and no matter how many times the Bad Bad Bad people try to do Bad Bad Bad things to Bella (which they only do because she’s so so so special anyway), he’ll take care of her. This is, theoretically, every young girl’s fantasy. The books are dead serious about this story. The movies not so much, which is what makes the movies bearable.

And that central message is somewhat undercut in New Moon, when Edward leaves Bella alone for two thirds of the movie and some other dude steps in and starts taking care of her instead. But we’re still on safe ground, because while Jacob is just as hot as Edward, he’s nonthreatening because he’s, like, three months younger than Bella or something. And in any case, during the first half of the movie, before Jacob transforms into a werewolf/total jerk (apparently the two go hand-in-hand) I was quite enjoying seeing The Saga’s central romance get turned on its head a little bit.

But on her own, Bella is, once again, too irritating to watch, and New Moon sends her into a months-long depression that makes her even more unbearable than usual. Fortunately, she’s not alone that much. Edward and Jacob don’t fail to entertain (except toward the end, as Jacob becomes more and more insufferable). And the side characters are once again universally hilarious – Charlie, Alice, the head Volturi dude, Jasper (still my favorite Cullen, although Alice and her fabulous Italian headscarf are now giving him a run for his money), and most of Jacob’s and Bella’s friends too. There isn’t enough Peter Faccinelli this time around, but he almost makes up for it with the awesome button-down/cardigan/tie/scarf combo he sports in his final scene. And there’s an awesome new evil chick, Jane, who I really hope we see a lot more of in the next two movies. She walks around doing her evil stuff wearing tights,TIGHTS! And let the record show that I totally did not realize she was played by Dakota Fanning until I had already typed those last few sentences, but now having looked it up I’m feeling vaguely aghast at myself.

But the truth is, feeling aghast at oneself is more or less the entire point of The Twilight Saga, for everyone over the age of 13. Even the truest fans have to admit that the heart of the story is pretty darn disturbing. So we can hardly blame the filmmakers for choosing to focus on bare werewolf chests instead. Let’s give America’s youth (and all those TwiMoms [TwilightMOMS] something wholesome to fixate on.

Want to read more Poptimal reviews of New Moon, check out Inisia Lewis’s article New Moon: Slaying the Box Office Competition