14 DAY TRIAL // The D day has come and the second installment in “The Twilight Saga,” “New Moon,” also based on one of Stephenie Meyer’s novels, is about to open nationwide in most territories. As fans are eagerly booking their seats and purchasing their tickets, ready to turn this film too into a success at least as resounding as the 2008 “Twilight,” critics are rushing to trash it without the least remorse.
From early previews and premieres, most critics have already had the chance to see “New Moon” and, as painful as this may sound to some fans, the consensus seems to be that, while the community will undoubtedly pay money to see it, the film carries little to no value if compared to the hype it has generated. “New Moon,” directed by the famous Chris Weitz and starring the larger than life Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner, is slow paced, awkward and all sorts of lame, they say.
The film is tediously long and, no matter how much the director’s efforts are apparent in it, it does not manage to take the viewer (presumed to be an outsider to the “Twilight” phenomenon) into that magic world that Twi-hards can’t stop talking about. In doing so, it becomes a redundant sequel that has no justification for its existence other than making an extra buck off a very gullible fanbase, critics say.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone even goes as far as to say that “New Moon” is among the few movies where one sees almost no acting at all. “I can’t comment on the acting because I didn’t catch Pattinson, Stewart and Lautner doing any. They basically primp and pose through the same humdrum motions they did before. Late in the film, a real actor, Michael Sheen (‘Frost/Nixon’), shows up as the mind-reading Aro, of the Italian Volturi vampires, and sparks things up. You can almost hear the young cast thinking, ‘Is that acting? It looks hard.’ So Sheen is quickly ushered out, and ‘New Moon’ begins swanning toward certain box-office glory,” Travers writes.
Jeff Walls of The Seattle PI agrees on the acting part. “The problem is that it is not interesting. […] The dialogue exchanges between the three main characters are so overblown and cheesy that I just can’t take any of it seriously. […] It wasn’t all bad. I did enjoy listening to the parody of big-budget action movies when Jacob and Bella go to the movies and there were a few humorous one-liners,” Walls writes. He then adds that, “It’s hard to connect with a movie that doesn’t seem to want us anyway.”
Of course, fans can always – and will undoubtedly do so – disagree with critics. To see what and who to believe, see “New Moon,” running in most theaters worldwide starting November 20.