It’s tough for a human to be in love with a romantic, charming vampire. It’s even worse when a hunky and constantly shirtless werewolf starts to catch your eye as well. That’s the dilemma created for the main character of the sequel to last year’s ‘Twilight’ novel adaptation. It’s no wonder these films attract a die-hard fan base of adolescent girls along with a massive female demographic.
Picking up directly where the events of ‘Twilight’ left off, ‘New Moon’ finds Bella Swan in a continual struggle to strike a comfortable balance between her human life and her new relationship with the mysterious vampire named Edward Cullen. However, when Edward leaves Bella in hopes that it will keep her out of harm’s way, Bella tries to mend her broken heart by befriending a classmate named Jacob (Taylor Lautner) who is dealing with his own issues of secretly becoming a werewolf.
The Twilight Saga has a female specific audience which surely came in handy when producing a series of films. Much like Michael Bay’s recent male centric approach to ‘Transformers,’ the Twilight franchise bends over backwards to pander to its predominantly female audience. Opposite the explosions and inexcusable objectifications of women in ‘Transformers,’ ‘New Moon’ extends from its predecessor to feature an endless amount of romantic innuendos and shirtless male torsos. The uniting factors between these two films are their poor approaches to character, awful senses of pacing and scripts that work toward the marketability of the film rather than the stories.
‘New Moon’ immediately gets off on the wrong foot by continuing to portray Bella as an uninteresting and extremely dislikable main character. When all she seems capable of doing is sulking, pouting and watching passively as two men fight for her attention, it’s nearly impossible to find anything remotely alluring about Bella. To make matters worse, the little chemistry that used to exist between Bella and Edward is now replaced by a dead-end relationship with a character who is typically characterized by his shirtless torso.
Outside of sheer laughter, the onslaught of shirtless men and tragic romanticism isn’t as bothersome as you might think. They can’t even be considered when discussing the downfall of this film. Instead, ‘New Moon,’ like its predecessor, remains a horribly acted, poorly scripted and endlessly depressing story that would better suit the paper thin stories found on daytime soap operas.
