"Twilight Saga: New Moon" DVD, Blu-ray Review

"Twilight Saga: New Moon"

DVD, Blu-ray Review

By Christopher Smith

Editor's Note: In anticipation for Wednesday’s release of “Twilight: Eclipse,” below is a brief review of the last film in the franchise, “Twilight: New Moon,” which is recommended only if you need a recap of what came before. Otherwise, skip it.




The story is dumb as hell, but at least its creators were smart enough to know what its audience want--shirtless boys, chaste kisses and a female character caught between the hotness of two hotties (a werewolf, a vampire) who apparently is willing to throw garlic cloves to the wind to give her soul to the latter.

The young woman in question is Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), whose hormones might as well be boiling beneath a satanic hellfire. We don’t know this because Bella expresses her emotions easily--she’s nearly a mute, poor thing, saying as little as possible--but because when the sparkly vampire, Edward (Robert Pattinson), decides he must remove himself from her life in order to protect her from his kind, she literally writhes in pain and screams in agony.

There to pick up the pieces in Edward’s absense is Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who wants more than a friendship with Bella. Together, they grow close over motorcycles, mutual sidelong glances and his bulging biceps. But here’s the thing--turns out Jacob has a gene that allows him to morph into a werewolf.

Who knew? He didn’t. And here’s the real issue at hand. Just as with Edward, if the two take the risk of edging toward sexual intimacy, Jacob could potentially harm her if things got out of hand between them. After all, all one has to do is look at the shredded face of one of the wives of Jacob’s werewolf leaders to know how dire having sexy times with a werewolf can be. Doing so might, in fact, cost Bella her life, or at least a disfigurement. And who wants that?

Well, of course, Bella does, though not with Jacob. She wants Edward, who appears to her in ghostly flashes that suggests to her that he’s still pining for her. What unspools from this is another glum film about the perils of teen intimacy that once again finds life hinging on abstinence and morality. While those are fine messages to send out to young audiences, the way its played here is so brooding, its nearly bloodless.

That is, of course, until the film’s final moments, when real heat emerges in Italy. Just what goes down there, we’ll leave for you, but it says a lot for the movie that the two most interesting characters come at the end--Dakota Fanning rules the screen as a dead vampire zealot with a mean stare, a tight golden bun and a hot clip, and Michael Sheen creates all kinds of chaos as the leader of all vampires. These two are so superior to the juiceless love otherwise served up in the movie, you can’t help wishing they had a movie of their own.

Grade: C-