New Moon Casts Dark Shadows

The continuation of the cult teenage saga, The Twilight, demonstrates that cinematographic quality is not a prerequisite for box office success.

It is a well-established rule in Hollywood that when you have a hit, make sure to produce a sequel. It’s one of the few risk-free ways to make money in Tinsel Town.

Summit Entertainment bosses clearly understand this. Having had the good fortune, in 2008, to pick up the  rights to a series of incredibly popular teen horror fiction, they released The Twilight, an incredibly low (for Hollywood anyway) budget movie.

Despite it’s almost complete lack of critical acclaim, with the movie theatres packed, Summit bosses decided just 20 hours after its release, to film the next book in the series and started shooting almost immediately.

I’m not in the target market, I accept, but the only way in which I could associate the word horror with New Moon is that it is a horror to watch. Half-witted dialogue, appalling editing, brutal factual mistakes and direction of a standard worthy of a local Idaho TV network are the trademarks of this film.

New Moon is the continuation of the Twilight Saga, a love story between a high-school girl, Bella Swan, and a vampire, Edward Cullen.

The first thing you notice about Cullen when he dismounts from his top-end black windowed SUV on the school parking lot is that his face looks as though someone has dipped him into a bag of flour, to give him that ‘authentic vampire’ look. High-end make-up artistry this is not.

Cullen, embodied numbly by Robert Pattinson, is a boy from the Cullen Clan, a family of vampires which is currently in residence in the north western USA. They move around the world, settling just briefly everywhere they go, as people soon start to notice that they are not ageing. The Cullens have been on a century-long diet, having decided they will no more feed on human blood.

The group of humanitarian vampires in the original film, The Twilight, had embraced Bella into their midst, as she had fallen deeply in love with the pale Edward. But now, Edward has to move on with his pack and Bella is left heart-broken. Her loneliness is interrupted by Jacob, a 16 year-old body builder, but as Bella grows close to him, she discovers Edward is her one true love and as a consequence, brutally pushes Jacob away.

Alas, her refusal brings out Jacob’s true nature. He is in fact a werewolf! (seriously, work with me here) from a Native-American wolfhuman family on a mission to hunt down and kill vampires who have not agreed to renounce human blood. One such vampire is Jessica who has sworn to kill Bella, because Edward killed had her lover in the original film, in order to save Bella.

So, with vampires running through forests and werewolfs running after them for around a quarter of the film, in a none too scary, or for that matter, interesting fashion, you are left with the frankly much more engaging options of either listening to the rattle of the air-conditioning in the cinema or scrolling through the old text-messages on your phone.

There is perhaps one other option: you can decide not to leave the cinema, ignore the ‘action’ and just look at the the scenery of the Canadian south west, where the film was shot, which is so strikingly beautiful, that not even the poorest directing and run-of-the-mill cinematography can ruin it entirely. The landscapes, pale sun and powerfully cloudy days are indeed the sole high-point in this film.

Love between a man and an immortal is, and always has been, an appealing topic for film-makers and true nectar for an audience. It was a delight to watch Dracula, embodied by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, as he bowed in blood-lust and despair over the fragile body of Isabelle Adjani.

The Dracula legend was brought back to life with an excellent and racy adaptation of the Bram Stoker book under the direction of Francis Ford Coppola in 1992 and the highly successful series TV series True Blood has kept up interest in all things vampire and human.

Yet it is The Twilight that the current generation of teenagers has decided to embrace.

The all-time record breaking first weekend, during which New Moon took in excess of $220 million at the box office, proves the appeal of the stories and the sense behind the decision to make the film. New Moon clearly demonstrates that,no different to years past, teenage audiences today do not need quality to be infatuated.

More senior film goers will perhaps remember how studios waited for years to give their fans a sequel worthy of the original. Terminator 2 and Aliens are proof that waiting sometimes brings quality along with revenue. Others may however recall the dismal Staying Alive which followed on the heels of Saturday Night Fever or the truly awful Airplane II, to know that the movie industry is a fickle world.

The full title of the film is The Twilight Saga: New Moon. At 130 minutes long, this really is a saga which re-defines the word boredom, and which, unfortunately, promises more sequels.

To that frightening prospect, I add the most confusing fact that the Classification Board of the Motion Picture Association of America rated the movie PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned).

There was nothing scary or risque in the movie so what I believe this must mean is: ‘parents strongly cautioned not to see the film’, or perhaps they meant: ‘No admittance for those over 13 years of age’. Whichever the
case, you are strongly advised to seek your escape to the fantasy world elsewhere.