The Twilight Saga: New Moon

RATING: **

It required a lot of effort to turn the first book in the Twilight series into a film,and it showed. Under the weight of the laboured story of a teenager in love with a vampire and the expectations of breathless fans,the film creaked with bad get-ups and even more pretentious acting.

New Moon at least doesn’t have that problem. The pair of Bella and Edward,played by Stewart and Pattinson,is spared shouldering the task of portraying their inexplicable,irreplaceable,unmatchable love on screen. The pair in question this time is Bella and Jacob,her friend who also happens to be a werewolf.

That said,Jacob (Lautner) slips into the skin of the werewolf,down to looking serious in just a pair of sawed-off and skin-tight shorts,with better ease than Pattinson does with all his carefully coiffeured,pancake-pale face and glowering-from-under-his-bushy-eyebrows look. Stewart shares an easy camaraderie and relationship with Lautner,something that she and Pattinson struggled to get across in Twilight.

New Moon has the added advantage of having a lot more going for the plot than the painful,played-out-in-repeated-detail love story of the first book. Weitz manages the appearance of the werewolves pretty well,jolting viewers with the suddenness with which they spring and the intent with which they prowl.

The Volturri episode,in contrast,is rushed through. Perhaps that’s not too bad,despite the fact that two fine actors like Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning pitch in for the brief scene. Whichever way you look at it,the whole episode of the great big house somewhere within a city where a vampire cult keeps laws,living in great refinement and secrecy,sending out its men in long cloaks to ferry in tourists for massacre,sounds highly improbable to translate with any credibility onto the big screen.

As for Stewart,who is enjoying great popularity courtesy the franchise—if not as much as Pattinson—needs to start looking happier. Though a girl who has vampires and werewolves fighting over her may not have much reason to smile. But not in the Twilight world,where Bella spends all her conscious moments dreaming of being bitten and turned into a “bloodsucker” herself. It never seems like that’s Stewart’s idea of how she wants to spend the next hundred years.