New Moon (2009)

I always felt that Movie Edward glowed (or radiated, if you like) under sunlight.

Well, New Moon proved me wrong. Edward totally sparkled.

After a papercut on Bella causes Jasper to go loco, Edward and family take off, not wanting to bring anymore trouble to Bella. In turn, Bella goes emo and also becomes an adrenaline junkie, as she gets visions of Edward, naggingacting as her rationale (since all of it's been converted to hormones), whenever she does something dangerous.

Her friend Jacob becomes the rebound guy, and when cool transforming stuff happens, Jake tells her that he has to stay away from her to avoid hurting her (i.e. repeating what happened in the beginning). After a bunch of stuff happens which led Edward to believe that Bella is dead, Bella and Alice go to Italy, to stop Ed from exposing himself to the masses in an effort to get the powerful Volturi to execute him.


[It's like Romeo and Juliet.]

After a show of vampiric mental abilities and a pretty cool fight scene, Alice manages to convince the Volturi that Bella will eventually be turned (we get to see Edward and Bella running in the woods, and Bella $pArK1eD), and the Volturi let the gang go. Everyone goes back to Forks, Bella tells Jacob that she chooses Edward, Edward asks her to marry him, the End.

This is the first time I actually felt like dozing off while watching a film. For a romance movie, there sure is a lot of talk and no action.

If you know what I mean WINK

I find New Moon slightly better than Twilight, mostly because of the wolf pack, and Jacob, Bella's werewolf boyfriend. Although the interaction between he and Bella were a bit too long (think about it, it took Bella like half an hour of real time to fall in love with Edward), it was fun to watch them, as Jake seems to have a LOT more personality than Edward.

Unlike Spider-man 3, which went downhill in the last half hour, New Moon actually went uphill during then, with the inclusion of the Volturi. It was a pity that they only had such a short appearance in the movie; they were basically the only highlight of the entire movie.

[After they returned to Forks, everything went back downhill again.]

Consistency is also lacking, though very minor. Like the part when everyone finds out that Bella is immune to their vampiric mental abilities (not including biting and hitting and other physical damage). Wouldn't she have been immune to Jasper's emotion-bending at the beginning of the movie?

And was it necessary to show Bella's dad grounding her? I mean, the movie ended with Bella stopping a fight between Edward and Jacob in the forest. As in, not in / anywhere near her father's house! That part was rather pointless (the grounding), and would've made the movie a bit shorter.

If only they hadn't put in so much of the, "Dear Alice," voiceovers (a few are okay, but when there were so many it's just tedious) and the dream-screaming (they should've just shown us what her dreams were), New Moon would've been, I guess, an hour-thirty or -forty, making it a much shorter movie, and way more tolerable, too. Less time spent on Bella moping would've been nice. I shudder to think how the October / November / December scene is treated in the book.

One thing I appreciated was the title of each movie. The previous one was about Edward, so Twilight; this one is about Jacob, so New Moon. The next one is Eclipse: which probably means that she will pick her final choice in that one, since 'eclipse' means half-moon and half darkness. Props to Stephenie Meyer.

The score was absolutely beautiful, and the soundtrack wasn't bad either, but I felt that a lot of songs were jammed in a two-hour movie, so much so that some of those songs only got very short snippets. Like Muse's Mon Cœur S'ouvre à ta Voix. I was expecting Uprising, so that was a very pleasant surprise, even though it was only on for about 10 seconds.


4/10. Werewolves and Italians were the best things in the movie. About 45 minutes cumulatively.

Though I'm not a fan of the series... Team Jacob :)