Cast: Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Ashley Greene
Genre: Drama | Fantasy | Horror | Romance | Thriller
Release Date: November 20, 2009 (US)
Company: Imprint Entertainment
Plot
AFTER Bella recovers from the vampire attack that almost claimed her life, she looks to celebrate her birthday with Edward and his vampire family, who call themselves the Cullens. However, things go wrong when Bella slices her finger and thirst overcomes the vampires. As a result, the Cullen family decide to leave Forks, Washington. Initially heartbroken, Bella finds a form of comfort in reckless living, as well as an even-closer friendship with Jacob Black. However, danger in different forms awaits.
Review
IT feels like missing the point to talk about The Twilight Saga: New Moon as a movie. This is a pop culture phenomenon, some weird early 21st century aberration.
So get ready for a bizarre soap opera, consisting of a succession of static scenes with characters loping into the frame to announce exactly what they’re thinking. Meanwhile, every so often, one of the characters makes a point of telling the perfectly average teenage protagonist (Bella) that she is the greatest thing on Earth. And each time that happens, 500 girls in the audience scream.
It’s great there’s a movie that makes teenage girls scream. Half of the movies Hollywood makes are designed to make teenage boys scream, and those boy movies are just as ridiculous and a lot nastier than New Moon.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
FOR movies I couldn’t intellectually defend but still unapologetically loved, I call them “juicebombs”. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, like its 2008 predecessor Twilight, is a classic juicebomb. Mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, the movie nonetheless twangs at some resonant affective chord. The viewer, at least, was catapulted back to that moment of adolescence when being mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, which felt like a passionate act of liberation. The Twilight movies are schlock, but they’re elegantly appointed, luxuriously enjoyable schlock, and the world they take place in — the densely forested, perpetually overcast, vampire-and-werewolf-ridden town of Forks — feels like a real, if fantastical, place. It’s this sense of place that elevates the Twilight films above the best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, made up of impenetrable blocks of descriptive yet curiously featureless prose.
Dana Stevens, Slate.com
CONSTRAINED by the plot of the novel, the film keeps the two lovers apart for quite a spell, robbing the project of the crazy-in-love energy that made Twilight, the first entry in the series, such a guilty pleasure. Weitz seems too rational a director for this kind of project. This lack of animating madness, combined with the novel’s demands, give much of New Moon a marking time quality.
