The Twilight Saga: New Moon

 

Sometimes there are no words to express the sadness. Sometimes there is no time to spend watching a movie as bad as New Moon. Kudos to me for not actually leaving the theatre 30 minutes after the movie started, but then again, it had some good moments, albeit a few. This movie will certainly appeal to young teenage girls who drool over six-packs and biceps, but from a story point of view, New Moon failed miserably.

The story resumes from where it stopped in the much-better-directed first part, in which vegetarian vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) and vampire wanna-be Bella (Kristen Stewart) fell in love with each other. In New Moon, Edward and his vampire family leave the town they lived in for ten years, and Bella is heartbroken. She meets the perpetually bare-chested werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner) and they start a weird love-hate relationship. Bella jumps off a cliff, Edward thinks she's dead, wants to kill himself, then she tracks him down and tells him she loves him. And he loves her back. And they want to spend the eternity together. Bleah!

It is horrible to see what cinematography has been reduced to these days. The gigantic box-office returns seem illogical, given that this is such a bad movie. But one thing is for sure, while many went to see 2012 not for the weak story but for the fantastic special effects, many will go see New Moon for the bare-chested hordes of men. Yeah, it's all about eye-candy, and these guys seem to deliver. The only sad part is that it seems like most of the scenes of this move were written around the whole notion of how to get these boys naked. Sometimes it looks like a very bad 1990's N-Sync or Backstreet Boys video, with water running down bare chests and everybody walking in slow motion.

All this aside, I did like one thing about this movie: camera movement and shots. The composition of almost every frame is done close to perfection. It almost seems like someone was watching a Stanley Kubrik movie right before they decided to shoot New Moon. The movie is visually pleasing, and if you ignore the lame story you might enjoy it.

The next installment of the saga is coming up sometime this summer. It will still get a bunch of money, but I hope humanity is smart enough not to put themselves through this mess once again. New Moon is a major fail in terms of cinematography. The plot is too sad, the acting is unconvincing and the story is just incredibly dull.