Sunday, December 20, 2009

"New Moon" Movie Review

I have to say, if anybody but Julianne had asked me to go see this movie, I wouldn't have.  But she's my best friend, so I felt I owed it to her . . . Anyway, you guys all know how much I hate the whole Twilight series, and why, so I'm going to try my absolute best to stay away from how awful the story is and just focus on the movie itself.

The best parts of the movie: The National Guard and Lovely Bones commercials/previews in the beginning, any scene that Victoria or Laurent were in, Bella jumping off the cliff, and the bit with the Volturi at the end.

The worst parts of the movie: Anytime Bella or Edward opened their mouths.

It's better than Twilight, and I think that's really the best I can say.  Much of the movie looks like it was directed by a 12 year old.  Chris Weitz seems to have started a love affair with slow motion that he definitely didn't have going on in The Golden Compass.  Slow motion is used to add to the story, NOT to tell the story.  There's a few scenes where it's used very well (the Victoria-in-the-forest-cliff-diving scenes come to mind) and some scenes where it's superfluous and childish (Bella running through the streets of Italy comes to mind).  On the other hand, maybe I'm just overestimating the intelligence of the general audience of this movie.

Which brings me to another one of my least favorite scenes: Bella sitting in a chair, with the camera spinning around her, watching the view outside her window change as the months go by.  Apart from the fact that the spinning camera is also way overused and all it accomplishes is making me dizzy, Weitz decided that he needed to have text onscreen saying the different months.  Way to hit people over the head . . . I think that the view alone should explain that time is passing.  Peh.

I do have to give credit where credit is due, however: the costume designers, the set people, and whoever designed the movie posters.  They all do a great job of making the film seem more mature/creepy/interesting than it actually is.  Apparently they're the only real professionals who worked on this whole movie.

There's very few characters in this film that I don't hate.  In fact, I can list them all on one hand.  Rosalie, Victoria, Laurent, the Volturi, and Jacob.  Unfortunately, they are the characters who get almost nothing to do the whole movie!  Rosalie is in like 2 scenes; Victoria gets enough time to come down out of a tree, scare a man to death, and cliff dive; Laurent just shows up to get killed, the Volturi are present but under-used and under-developed, and Jacob is in . . . my friend told me 30 minutes of a movie that's over 2 hours long.  Now, I've never read the books, so I can't say if their screen time in the movie corresponds to their roles in the book, but I think it's a darn shame that they're not given more to do.  That alone would have made the film better.  Like Rosalie.  We know pretty much nothing about her, except that she hates Bella.  Why can't that dynamic be explored more?  Or Victoria.  She's easily my favorite character.  Pretty, strong, and, like Rosalie, one of the very few characters who has no pretense at all.

So, I give this movie a 0.5 out of 5 stars.  The movie itself is sloppily put together, the underlying story is pathetic, and most of the main characters are boring as anything.  I watched it just to make fun of it . . . I suggest you do the same.

*hides from screaming horde of Twilight fans

3 comments:

  1. Dude, I also had to see this movie and had to pay $12 for it. Movies are so expensive, but anyway, not my point. I hated how pathetic Bella was. Seriously, they are TEENAGERS. There s no way they could be that much in love that she wants to be a vampire for him and leave her father. Also, the part where she's watching the months go by, I hated it. She couldn't live without her beloved Edward, he left a hole, blah blah blah. People break up with loved ones all the time for stupid stuff and yes it's ok to be sad for some time and a could se a wife who lost her husband be that depressed for that long of a time, but they were only together for a year. I say move on and stop wanting a jerk who left you to come back. People look up to this girl and they shouldn't. Her behavior makes it look like women should just mope around and be depressed forever because their "loved one" left them. Whatever, who cares. I have my own problems to worry about than this. At least Twighlight was telling a love story (yes an over-dramatized, slightly pathetic love story), but New Moon is just pathetic. I felt like there was no point to this book. She took a whole book o something she could have described in one or two sentences. What a waste of paper. eriously people, read the Hollow Men. Really fabulous and utterly amazing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. i love u ash ^_^
    that's the rant i was really trying to avoid, because i wanted to keep the review more about the production aspects of the movie, so thanks fo saying it for me ^_^

    ReplyDelete