While watching “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” one is haunted by the thought that director Chris Weitz’s main accomplishment was to create an unwitting homage to the first Twilight film and its director, Catherine Hardwicke.
With the Twilight novels, author Stephenie Meyer roughed out a storyline that sent harmonic tremors deep into the lizard brains of its readers. Twilight fans love these books and are willing to forgive anything that happens between their covers including some pretty uneven writing. Hardwicke smoothed out the edges. Bella (Kristen Stewart) got a little tougher and the cool hunk of marble that is Edward (Robert Pattinson) responded with the occasional display of vulnerability. They became, if one can say this about the undead, a very likeable couple. Better still, she lacquered the fluffy proceedings with a tint of indie-film sexiness.
Then Chris Weitz took the reins and did a face plant into every blockbuster formula that Hardwicke had worked so hard to avoid. “New Moon,” as Weitz conceives it, is less a film than it is a franchise episode.
To be fair, that’s probably the way Meyer’s second novel was written. Bella and Edward, who got together in the first film, need to be pulled apart so the franchise can keep going. With a level of irony that is the most fun the film lets itself have, the love that was supposed to last the ages is torn asunder by a paper cut. Bella cuts her finger opening a birthday present in the company of Edward’s family and Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) makes a spectacular leap for her throat.
Edward decides it is safer for Bella if he removes himself and his kin from her life—the ubiquity of paper being what it is—and Bella is left alone.
Or so we think. Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), Bella’s friend from the Quileute tribe, offers himself up as not only a romantic replacement for Edward but the new resident monster. It seems that over the summer Jacob has been initiated into a pack of werewolves that protect his tribal lands.
Weitz is not without his directorial instincts, the best of which is to get Taylor Lautner to take his shirt off. With that simple act, Lautner has been catapulted onto Hollywood’s A-list. Jacob is the hunk that gives “New Moon” its heat.

But it’s not enough to save the film. While “Twilight” approached its subject with a light touch, flirting with the idea of the supernatural lurking in the shadows of an ordinary little town, the script for “New Moon” is over the top. There’s even a side trip to Italy and a vampire cabal that renders silly the efforts of a slew of gifted actors. The plot of “New Moon” wallows in Bella’s emotional collapse over Edward’s departure and the self-destructive things she’s willing to do to get him back. The gutsy heroine that Kristen Stewart was able to create in “Twilight” has been reduced to the ex-girlfriend from hell.
It’s not pretty and it makes you wonder. Chris Weitz is a competent director but he has no feel for this material. He may be suffering from a gender deficit. The Twilight saga may be a woman’s story to tell.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Directed by Chris Weitz
Rated PG-13
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