The Twilight Saga: New Moon

It’s easy for an actor to give a good performance when they have a strong script and a sympathetic director, but the real test is when they have to fight a holding action without material aid. On those grounds Kristen Stewart, the 19-year-old star of the second installment in the Twilight series, deserves a medal. The teenager does sterling work to invest a dreary, flat storyline with an emotional acuity it doesn’t deserve, especially as her celebrated co-star, the perpetually bedraggled Robert Pattinson, is absent for the majority of scenes.

Some middle editions of trilogies are darker, resolute pictures. New Moon is not one of them. Adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling novel by Melissa Rosenberg, who also handled 2008’s Twilight, the story spends a great deal of time establishing already proven constants – there’s barely a surprise or welcome upheaval to be had. The grand love between Stewart’s Bella Swan, the shy teenage girl, and Pattinson’s Edward Cullen, the 109-year-old vampire who still hangs out at high school, is the enduring focus, with any other storyline a mere diversion.

Edward and his extended family leaves the town of Forks, in the pacific Northwest, and Bella, after an incident at her 18th birthday celebration where she gets a paper cut from her present and Edward’s adopted vampire brother, Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), can’t control himself and tries to kill her (vampire etiquette is tricky). Believing that his presence puts Bella in danger, Edward breaks up with her, sending Bella into a downward spiral of daytime listlessness and nightmares after dark.

Stewart has a long, angled face that holds pain up to the camera. She doesn’t have the lightest touch, but she somehow gives Bella a sense of distress and inner turmoil without merely wallowing. Unfortunately Stewart is in a film that uses a literary genre traditionally associated with metaphors of sexual freedom and the abandonment of Victorian repression to instead celebrate straitlaced purity and female subjugation to male protection.

With Edward gone Bella can only pull through by hanging out with her newly buffed friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who obviously has a few problems of his own. One is an inability to keep his t-shirt on. The second is that he’s a werewolf, traditional vampire foes. The choice, New Moon tells its predominantly female and teenage audience, is between the pale, moody Edward and the muscled, Native American Jacob. It’s as if she’s not complete without a tortuous romance to define her.

Pushed to choose myself, I’d settle on Edward, if only because Lautner is a banal screen presence who is reduced to furrowing his brow to indicate his moodiness; his pectoral muscles are more expressive than his face. His work typifies the resolutely drab and predictable decisions made by director Chris Weitz, who previously failed with 2007’s The Golden Compass. There’s nary a hint of swooning passion to his camerawork, and the limited special effects are often look like early drafts from a better budgeted production. Only Alexandre Desplat’s score, staffed with Romantic flourishes, evinces genuine technical achievement.

The final scenes put Bella and Edward back together, something that was never in doubt, with the latter traveling to Italy where the Volturi, a kind of vampire royalty, have the power to kill him after he mistakenly believes Bella has perished. Michael Sheen (The Queen) plays their leader and he briefly gives the narrative some much needed playfulness, but New Moon just keeps ploughing on, pausing only to offer up professions of love that Pattinson looks embarrassed by (“You’re my only reason to stay alive,” is standard fare), before finishing with a cliffhanger that’s pure soap opera. It’s a backwards step for an already artistically disappointing franchise.