Twilight New Moon: First review of long awaited sequel



The Twilight Saga: New Moon (12A)

Verdict: Disastrous sequel squanders good will created by first movie.



This is a mere six minutes longer than the first Twilight movie, but it feels like six hours. I gave the original four stars, but the sequel is tedious, long-winded and not so much undead as almost entirely devoid of life.

Disaster: Actors Kristen Stewart (L) and Robert Pattinson, in the new Twilight Saga film, New Moon

Even die-hard fans of the franchise may gasp at the excruciatingly long dialogue scenes, directed at the pace of an expiring snail by Chris Weitz, who does an even more dreary, franchise-threatening job here than he did on The Golden Compass.

Teenage girl fans of Stephenie Myers’ immensely lucrative books won’t need to be told that in this sequel our heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) enters her senior year at high school, and is deserted by her vampire boyfriend Edward (Robert Pattinson).

As a result, she becomes wild and reckless, and falls on the rebound for a Native American hunk called Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who has a few life-changing supernatural issues of his own.

Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) get close after Edward disappears from her life



At first, I thought Jacob’s problem might be that he was flamboyantly gay, or moonlighting as a sales assistant at Abercrombie & Fitch.



He spends most of the movie stripped to the waist and wandering into the forest with like-minded guys, all of them heavily muscled and naked except for shorts.



Such scenes seem to be aimed more at confirmed bachelors than at teenage girls.

The script makes frequent reference to Romeo and Juliet, and you may be able to deduce from the trailer that here the Montagues and Capulets are vampires and werewolves. But there’s no Mercutio to offer light relief, and the dialogue is far from deathless.

The film fatally fails to make non-fans care about any of the leading characters, and vampirism is made to seem bland and boring.



And Jacob spends most of the movie stripped to the waist and wandering into the forest with his wolf pack



All the fun and frisson have gone out of the central relationship. Bella does little more than mope.



Edward seems content to pose and look vaguely nauseous, which in view of the script is understandable.

The poorly constructed plot makes Bella do absurd things, like stroll unaccompanied into a forest when she knows that hikers there have been disappearing at an alarming rate, and a particularly vengeful vampire is out to kill her.

Her father is supposedly the chief of police, but when Bella disappears into the woods for hours, and a semi-naked man emerges holding her in his arms, he can’t be bothered to ask any questions.

Slightly less scary than an X Factor performance by Jedward, the film is blatantly aimed at girls between 13 and 15. That’s IQ, by the way, not age.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens around the country on Friday [November 20]