NEW MOON review: by the numbers

NEW MOON review: by the numbers

Dec 03

If I were writing a review for a normal, everyday, average movie, I would use words. Lots of lovely, eloquent, deliciously descriptive words, because I consider you intelligent enough to digest them and then form your own opinion about what I’ve said and how it relates to the movie I reviewed.

In this case, however, you’ve almost certainly already made up your mind already about New Moon. You’re either a tween girl / forty-something mum in love with Edward and / or Jacob’s muscles, or you’re a regular person who doesn’t give a flying pig about the Twilight phenomenon.

So rather than offending the former group and preaching to the choir of the latter group, I thought I’d sit through New Moon taking note of a few things, organising them into categories, and then posting the review in numbers. That way, if you don’t give a crap about Twilight, you can scan through the numbers and scoff at all the idiots who do care, and if you do give a shit about Bella and her weird friends, you can look through these numbers and hopefully feel an inkling of shame at the sheer amount of hard scientific evidence there is that this movie sucks balls.

So without further ado, I present to you, organised by Number of Offences, the eight most frequently-occurring problems with New Moon.

8 – Number of times Jacob Black appears shirtless

One of the biggest selling-points of the film is young Taylor Lautner’s physique, and director Chris Weitz puts it to good use. I’d be more angry if actress’ bodies weren’t treated exactly the same way in every other film, but you can understand why this would be annoying. I’ve heard girls say they don’t even like the story, or Bella, or Edward–they only watched it for Jake’s muscles. Doesn’t google images also have Jake’s muscles? I added an extra two points for the long, long scene where he’s half-naked in the rain. The poor chap’s shivering like crazy.

15 – Number of times the soundtrack doesn’t match the emotion of the scene

You know the feeling–the two lovers are about to kiss yet you are hearing some sinister, evil music–it’s jarring, right? Surely a sign of bad filmmaking? I just checked the number of tracks on the New Moon soundtrack–there are fifteen.

16 – Number of times a scene is derailed purely for the sake of exposition, and never recovers

The first and most jarring of these scenes is when Bella and Edward are chilling at school, watching a video of Romeo and Juliet (subtle), and then, completely unsolicited, Edward suddenly starts spelling out the rules for suicide amongst vampires. At first I was like ‘what is going on?’ But then I realised the information must come in handy later on in the film. Bad screenwriting, bad!

16 – Number of times people start breathing heavily without engaging in any form of physical activity

Because heaving bosoms are more effective than good writing and genuine emotion?

16 – Number of times Edward says or does something stupid

The plot hinges on the choices characters make, which is why most of the choices made in this film make no sense whatsoever. Most of these points came from hideous utterances that I’m sure girls love to hear–shit like “you’re the only thing that can hurt me now,” and “you’re the only reason I have for staying alive.” For a character that’s been alive for over a century, his repertoire is pretty shallow.

His journey is actually a little interesting. Due to a massively-contrived device of plot, Edward runs like a coward from his true love, only to be told erroneously that she is dead. Rather than call back and try to get through to Bella or her father, he immediately crushes the phone and runs crying to the Volturi (a bunch of ancient dickheads who snack on humans and act as a killjoy for vampires the world over), begging them to kill him. But instead of seeing the argument between Edward and the Volturi council, instead of seeing the conflict raging within his heaving bosom, we get a montage of Bella sitting in front of a window entirely motionless for three fucking months. And it’s all his fault. Boo.

18 – Number of times a scene drifts off mid-way through, and never recovers

This one ties into the exposition-in-scene problem–a dramatic shift part-way through a scene that completely changes the original meaning and atmosphere, that never returns to what launched the scene to begin with. But note that these eighteen are in addition to the 16 that drift away into pure exposition. That’s 34 together. The worst offender dovetails with the music problem above and the Bella problem below: Bella starts heading to a cliff she can jump off (to pretend to want to kill herself, natch); meanwhile a ferocious battle between wolves and vampires is taking place in the forest–all set to the same droning, moaning song. The scene starts slow and thoughtful, and ends up as an absolute clusterfuck of random events.

20 – Number of times Jacob says or does something stupid

The worst offender goes something like ‘you won’t like me when I’m angry.’ Sound familiar? That’s right, when Jake gets angry he turns into a big gree–er, wolf. Let’s stay with the wolves for a moment: first off, they look awful. They look nothing like real wolves, anatomically speaking, and they are rendered and animated in such a way that I just felt awkward watching them. And secondly, if you’re going to deviate from age-old lore (silver bullets and moonlight oddly never enter this film) you should at least set yourself apart from the traditions everyone knows and loves. Why not make them werebears or weredragons or something other than wolves.

(Plus how do the wolf pack always manage to carry infinite pairs of shorts and shoes with them everywhere they go? They’re naked after they transform, but they always find clothes before entering a scene with Bella. Magic.)

And now, the icing on the hate cake:

63 – Number of times Bella says or does something stupid

This score exceeded even my lofty expectations of failure. Bella is ostensibly the protagonist of this film, but judging by this huge score she’s also the main antagonist. Combine this with Edward and Jacob’s score, and you get almost a hundred–a hundred lines of dialogue and character choices that interfere with an audience’s appreciation of the film. That’s one every ninety seconds. One immersion-smashing, cringe-inducing interruption every one and a half minutes.

How do I define stupid? Something I’d laugh at in real life. I scribbled down a few favourites as examples–Bella approahces a seedy, drunken guy on a motorbike and asks for a ride; Bella switches off a radio (thank god) and claims not to like music; Bella gets annoyed at Jacob for being born a werewolf (“Can’t you just stop?”); Bella slaps a werewolf, is surprised when it tries to kill her; Bella opens a scene with Jacob–no greetings–with “So you’re a werewolf”; Bella tells her vamp buddy Alice “Jacob’s kind of a werewolf” (kind of? Kind of? Did tweens write this as well?); Bella regularly sends deep and meaningful emails to an account that does not exist; she scores a point for every time she tries vainly to kill herself; and she scores another point for using a Mac.

Judging by the millions of clueless girls who have already flocked to this cinematic abortion, should we be surprised when the world is run by slobbering idiots in about thirty years’ time? Probably not. Bella is the worst female role model I’ve seen in a film. She’s self-harming, rude, obnoxious, indecisive, hopeless, mopey, deathly-serious, stuttery, and messes around with the emotions of two guys for no other reason than it’s dramatic to have a love triangle. She is an empty shell of a character, ready for tween girls to project their own failures onto in some sick, twisted form of wish-fulfilment.

To be fair, Jacob’s pecs are lit and shot quite well, but otherwise the film fails on every other level: the story, characters, narrative structure, the soundtrack–it’s shocking that this film has sold more than a million dollars’ worth of tickets, let alone the hundreds and hundreds of millions it already has.

Imagine if Bella were a man, and Edward and Jacob were women–traditional romance cliche, but with a sexual role reversal. Now that would be interesting. Instead we get this backwards, anti-feminist, anti-equality snoozeathon with nary a worthy character or scene in sight. I know that good populist entertainment for women is hard to come by, but please, for the love of all that is good, stop supporting this bullshit before it gets really out of hand. Oh, and in case you were in any doubt, this film is an absolute trainwreck from beginning to end.

01/100