Century of the Vampire: The Twilight Saga New Moon (2009)

Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.

Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 2008 Catherine Hardwicke movie Twilight. Today, he looks at the 2009 Chris Weitz movie, The Twilight Saga: New Moon. This article will contain spoilers.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which is the full and official name of this film that we’ll print once in the body for accuracy’s sake and then shorten to New Moon from here forward, is not a good movie; however, we’re moving in the right direction. Kind of. It’s still a mess, the characters still aren’t what you’d call “likeable,” and it’s still hewing way too close to a novel written by someone who fundamentally doesn’t understand how to use conflict to tell a story, but this isn’t the slog that the original film is. Mainly what I’m saying is: The dumb shirtless hunk numbers are up, and that’s a very good thing just for the general vibes if nothing else.

Franchises didn’t used to take three to four years off between mega-picture, which is the way Disney has sort of configured things in the market over the last ten years; the Twilight movies, like the original Harry Potter films, were written, cast, shot, edited, and released on a very tight production schedule such that the five films released like clockwork in each successive year from 2008 to 2012 (I was very close to being able to say “successive falls” here, but while films 1, 2, 4, and 5 were released in November, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse went to market in June for reasons we’ll get to in the next piece, assuming that when I look them up they’re interesting in the slightest). In December 2008, they changed out directors, swapping Catherine Hardwicke for Chris Weitz, and switched production locations from the actual Oregon depicted in the first movie to Vancouver, for uninteresting tax reasons that meant greenscreening in a bunch of stuff from the first film. Whatever. The real reason to shoot in British Columbia is all the forests, and reader, New Moon is incredibly concerned with forests and the goings-on therein.

This is to the film’s benefit, in my opinion. I don’t particularly like the character of Jacob Black; he’s stupid, mopey, and gets angrily possessive in the way all the heroic men in this franchise do, and Meyer (along with Melissa Rosenberg, who adapted this for the screen) have absolutely no interest in even pretending like he’s gonna get the girl in the end. Taylor Lautner doesn’t particularly elevate the material until he takes his shirt off, not that there’s much to elevate; he’s certainly no Pattinson, who is doing his level best with this dreck from a much higher resting level. But, so far at least, these movies are much more tolerable and fun when Jacob and his world are on screen and the Cullen family are as far away from Forks as they can possibly get. The vampires of Twilight are such a drag, and the movie completely faceplants once Edward returns in the third act to spirit Bella away to Italy for some sub-Underworld vampire elder governing body shenanigans.

Before then, there’s some fun enough stuff! We’re still running way too long at 2 hours and 15 minutes, and the first and last half hours are dominated by the Edward plot, which is mainly about how he wants to kill himself for reasons that are mostly irritating. We do at least get Pattinson delivering the hysterical line, “I envy Romeo. Not the girl; the suicide,” in high school English -- if the script could have reliably delivered this degree of maudlin psychosis on a regular basis, there might have been something here. Eventually Bella cuts her thumb at the 18th birthday party the Cullens are throwing her in her home and one of Edward’s siblings -- Jasper, but it doesn’t matter -- goes berserk after her with hunger in what feels kind of like a clumsy Dracula homage. Perhaps after seeing so many scenes of humans ostentatiously slicing their hands open in front of vampires, I just think they’re all Dracula references, but in my defense: Most of them are!

Edward declares that he and Bella Cannot Be Together and the entire Cullen family ups and moves to Europe on that specific whim. Bella goes through her own depressive haze for about six months -- we get a montage of her being basically catatonic from October through December and then her sending e-mails to the Cullens that bounce until it’s spring time again -- and then she realizes, to make a long story short, that whenever she puts her life in danger, a psychic projection of Edward appears to her like the most irritating Force ghost of all time. Given that Bella is already constantly saying, doing, and e-mailing stuff about needing to see Edward again that should be getting her flagged for the school guidance counselor, this immediately creates what’s called a “perverse incentive.”

Jacob, eager to impress Bella, gets his hands on an old motorcycle and fixes it up, just for her. You can basically see the entire arc of this part of the plot the moment it starts -- Bella’s about to start putting her life in increasing danger so she can see more of her vampire ex who went no contact, while falling for the new guy who is actually in her life -- but the next hour or so of getting there isn’t so bad. The shirtless werewolf hunks have already been commented on, but the werewolf pack in New Moon is fundamentally good-natured in ways that vampires obviously are not, even in the best of depictions. Twilight is of course a fundamentally sexless franchise -- it is as much a part of the phenomenon on display in the seminal essay Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny as the Marvel superhero films starting up alongside it were; Captain America: The First Avenger would be out the same year as the fourth Twilight film -- but there is at least some fumbling towards “one of these people is a teen who wants to be kissed and the other is God’s Perfect Hot Idiot” in here, which is a far more established conceit in young adult fiction across the decades. The first of these scenes happens right after Jacob turns into a werewolf for the first time, cutting his hair and losing his shirt as part of the ritual, and this has a visibly obvious effect on Bella. He also then dumps her? There is so much performative, “You must leave! And never see me again!” teen behavior in these films, almost solely from the boys.

Then some action happens -- Laurent, the one black man allowed in these films, jumps Bella in the woods to try and take revenge for his serial killer buddy’s death at the end of the last movie, and gets torn apart by the werewolf pack -- and Jacob shows up again, shirtless again, in Bella’s bedroom to apologize. What I appreciate about Stewart’s performance of Bella here is that she is not only incredibly distracted by the body transformation that Jacob has undergone (in real life, Lautner put on like thirty pounds of muscle in three months to keep his job, which, again ties into the RS Benedict essay linked just up the page), but she is openly confused by it, brow furrowed, mouth agape, staring at the eight pack. Anyway, in this scene Jacob is pulling another move directly out of Edward’s playbook, which is the ol’ “I wish I could tell you, but you wouldn’t understand!” (At this point she knows werewolves exist, but not that he is one; very silly.) From a werewolf this thankfully comes off as pouty and self-loathing, something that approximates the actual intended effect -- bless his heart, he doesn’t understand just how much kinky monster fic this lady has been reading, and also he’s not real good with words. When Edward pulls this move, it comes off so unbearably condescending it can’t be read as anything other than infantilizing.

The funniest scene between the two is basically the last one of this act of the film, before the Cullens return in full and sweep Bella off to Italy and a very silly looking Michael Sheen. Bella knows his deal now; Jacob drops Bella off back at her house after another day of partying with the boys (shirtless) and taking long walks on the beach, talking about how they can’t be together because Jacob’s such a monster. He’s about to head out to hunt Victoria -- remember her? The last remaining evil vampire from the trio in the first movie? She wasn’t actually in the first eighty minutes of the movie, but she’s back now. Anyway, he says, “I better go,” and Kristen Stewart, standing outside her dark and empty house because her sheriff dad is out on the prowl for vampires himself, hits him with the look and says, “You gotta go.” It’s actually a question, but her incredulity turns it into a statement. And he blasts right through that stop sign with, “Yeah. I got a vampire to kill!” She looks at the ground, disappointed, and we cut to him high stepping down the road, jogging off into the night. Just an absolute golden retriever of a man.

Speaking of -- the werewolves in this actually look pretty good, mainly because of two key decisions that Underworld went the other way on: First, don’t spend a long time with their transformation and turn it into a body horror thing. Werewolves in New Moon rarely switch forms on screen and when they do, the human body just kind of tears away and a giant fully-formed dog replaces it. Second: Yeah, just stick with giant wolf-dogs. None of these half-man half-beast forms intended to show off ripped arms and abs; just have those on the human form and don’t let any of the guys wear shirts. The technology, especially at this point in time, is much better suited to figuring out how to make real animals look good in natural light than big unnatural movie monsters. Also, not for nothing, but the game here is making these monsters incredibly sympathetic and not gross -- all the hot boy protestations about how they’re irredeemable creatures of the whatever is entirely romance novel chaff being set up for the heroine to sweep away, after all. Like with the vampires in this series glittering in sunlight instead of burning, you want big cuddly dogs here, not weird ugly mutant freaks.

Victoria survives this hunt -- she survives the film, in fact, and will be back in the next installment played by Bryce Dallas Howard -- by fleeing her pursuers, jumping off a cliff into the icy Pacific waters, and never being seen again in this runtime. Seriously, she just shows up, runs around a bit, and vanishes until the next film. Meyer is atrocious at figuring out how to move her plots along and the insistence on fidelity to her work -- which will not last into the final two movies -- is one of the best cases we have for why “Best Adapted Screenplay” is an awards category and why novelists generally aren’t allowed to dictate terms on adaptation. Bella jumps after Victoria into the water -- following Jacob’s clueless rejection of her so he can instead go fail to kill a vampire, this is explicitly a suicide attempt to try to force Edward to take her back, and it is wildly successful -- and I immediately begin to flag on the rest of New Moon.

Now that Edward’s family is back in the picture (by means of Alice, who is the vampire that actually flies back to pick her up), suddenly Jacob’s interested, and we get some werewolf and vampire back and forth to remind everyone that in the third movie these two families are actually gonna face off. Then it’s off to Italy for…alright, look. None of this matters, okay. Edward wants to commit suicide by tribunal of vampire elders led by Michael Sheen, but they tell him he’s too cool and they won’t kill him. So he decides to walk outside and glitter in the sun in front of the mortals to force them to kill him rather than betray the Vampire Secret. He’s gonna do this mostly naked so we can get the Robert Pattinson shirtless shot too, because he’s been unable to fulfill his quota offscreen for most of this film. Bella runs into his arms at the last second and stops him; one of the unhealthier relationships covered so far in our journey through, again, vampire cinema is back on.

There is another showdown between the vampire elders and Edward, because now they do want to kill him for telling Bella that vampires are real. Here, Bella plays her final card, which is also her only card, and is the card she plays in literally every situation: She tells the vampire elders to kill her instead. You know how most romance heroines tell their monster lovers that in fact, they’re not so monstrous, and there is a real man that they love underneath that scary visage? Bella is actually very cool with the monstrous visage, and really wants the monster to fuck her up. This is something like the fourth or fifth time in two movies she’s asked for death. The vampire elders, clearly unfamiliar with her game, become the latest group of people to ask Edward, “Wait, what if you just made Bella a vampire?” Since we’re finally reaching the end of the film, Edward’s response this time is, “Yes…but only if you marry me, Bella.” It remains incredibly funny he seemed to think all this time that this was a dealbreaker of some kind.

The good news is the next movie presumably takes place back in Forks again and will have more werewolves in it; the bad news is there’s going to be a lot more fighting directly over Bella, and presumably the vampires won’t fuck off for most of the middle of the film. Which is a weird tack for the vampire movie review column to take, but seriously, these are the worst silver screen vampires we’ve had to deal with yet, here. We’ll see what nonsense they get up to next time in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

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Tags: century of the vampire | the twilight saga | new moon