You could see two hours of this!
Are you on team Edward or team Jacob? This has been the most frequently asked question by teenage girls worldwide since Stephany Meyer’s New Moon was translated onto the big screen. It seems that most Honduran girls are voting for Jacob. While New Moon is worth seeing (for women at least), it is more for the male eye-candy and not for the character development.
If you’re on the Edward team, you will be sorely disappointed by this chapter of the Twilight saga. The movie has almost no Edward screen time. At the beginning of the movie, he decides to be the better vampire and leave his love, Bella Swan, in order to keep her safe. He does not truly appear until the end of the movie for some overtop, Italian scenes, which are incredibly entertaining and worth the wait. Even in Italy, we do not get a feel for the real Edward beneath the pale, cold skin, but enjoy looking at him none-the-less.
New Moon has little to do with Edward and less to do with the development of Bella Swan, or lack there of. It seems to focus on Jacob’s coming of age story. Not only does he come into himself as he realizes he is not just a rebellious 16 year-old boy, but a werewolf; he also comes into his physical appearance: from his dorky, not-so-flattering long hair, to stripping his shirt off to save Bella and revealing the best scenery in Forks, to graduating to a hip style and ditching the shirt completely for the entire remainder of the movie. While the depth of his character is never revealed, Jacob-lovers are in for a fun treat with the amount of half-nude screen time.
While Jacob grows on the audience as the movie continues, Bella’s character leaves much to be desired. Any feminist over the age of 18 should be enraged by the helpless teenager who’s obsessed with going “over the hill” (I can imagine that dating vampires would give one a complex). What seemed like hours of close-up shots of Kristen Stewart feeling depressed in her bedroom would bore even the biggest Bella fanatic.
In fact, the whole movie leaves something to be desired, if you were looking for meaningful dialogue and character development. That said, if you’re looking for the same addictive reaction Buffy gave us in the late 90′s, I could not recommend New Moon more.
