The first Twilight movie was a vaguely faithful adaptation of Ms.Meyer’s work, with overly florid prose translating as an overly long movie that just scraped past our twee sensors into the ’sort of ok’ category thanks to director Catherine Hardwicke nailing an atmosphere of repressed teenage sexuality that lent just the right amount of tension to proceedings. Unfortunately Golden Compass helmer Chris Weitz takes no such risks, slavishly following the purple passages to produce an uneven film that would benefit from healthy dash of irony.

The mopey, very teenage scenario is played to the hilt throughout, with new characters barely introduced and far too much time spent on wistful staring out of windows, resulting in a film that continually slows to a crawl. While it’s perhaps admirable that there are no concessions made to newcomers, it’s also unprofessional to assume that every viewer will be completely versed in this particular Vampire lore. Make no mistake, this is squarely targeted at girls of a certain age with rampant R-Patz lust at the forefront of their minds.

Plot wise, heartbreak is high on the agenda, as Edward’s family decide they’d rather scarf Bella down with ketchup than bond with her. To avoid a repeat performance, Edward leaves her,entrusting her care – as you do – to jailbait werewolf Jacob (a heroically brooding Taylor Lautner). We’re already into the realm of the preposterous McGuffin, and there’s precious little to help you take things seriously. Edward struts around, taking on some unfortunately bargain basement Werewolves as the misery heightens to operatic levels, only broken up by a variety of young men ripping their shirts off, occasionally in slow motion. Dialogue is portentous in the extreme, the supposedly dramatic pauses deployed regularly enough to induce a bizarre, Shatner-like cadence throughout.

Despite the frothing bile it induced in sections of the audience, it’s unprofessional to moan about the..erm…moaning. Overwrought suffering is as central to the mythos as a killer robot is the The Terminator. This is a film about the compelling totality of first love – judged from a distance it’s melodramatic and ridiculous, but for devotees it’s all-important. Judged on its own merits, New Moon contains exactly as much Pattison cod-heroics and oiled body flexing as the book and for fans that’s surely all that matters.

A very specifically targeted, bloody ridiculous mess that will either put you into paroxysms of angsty lust or have you rolling your eyes as our hero skips in slow motion through the enchanted forests of the Pacific Northwest (backed up by – it has to be said – a pitch-perfect indie soundtrack that’s really far too good for this sort of thing). It isn’t a great film, but it is a future guilty pleasure that efficiently sets up characters and events for next year’s ‘Eclipse’.

Generally, we watch any old crap round here – in the interest of being a representative, even-handed site obviously – from Marley & Me to Apocalypse Now,it’s all fair grist to the review grinder-yep,we even sat through Troll 2 once.

But just occasionally there are some movie crimes so cynical and heinous in their deployment that we’re robbed of even the enjoyment bought by bright shapes moving around a large screen.
Twilight: New Moon is one of them…

The Twilight Saga’s advance guard of posters and promos have been doing the rounds for a few weeks now, it’s gangsta/Calvin Klein ad Werewolves looking like the world’s worst boy band as they balefully bring to life everything awful about post-Rowling fiction in one sanitised, imaginatively stultified package

The reasons for the unerring – and to most people over 30,completely mystifying – popularity of the Virginity-embracing Goth-a-thon are manifold and as ancient as the vampire myth itself, but the main one?

Boredom.

To contextualise; it’s probably worth remembering at this point that tabloid fodder Cradle of Filth are from a small country village, the interminable ennui of small-town existence producing gratuitous, theatrical stabs at an inescapable conformity that have absolutely nothing to do with the isolationist work of their contemporaries

Twilight has risen from the endless malaise of the American Midwest. Despite the stunning scenery, for many growing up there it’s an endless vista of mini-malls and soccer meets, a land robbed of endless opportunity that retains a general snobbishness for any authentic ‘old-world’ culture (”What do you eat in Britain?” Is a standard enquiry I received while travelling), and while this is a gross oversimplification; in terms of romance, Utah is up there with Chernobyl.

It’s no wonder then that the Disneyfied, stripey-sock Goth peddled by Hot topic is grasped so ravenously by teenagers in a locale where dying your hair or missing church is a rebellious act, and although tweens the world over go through endless recycling of these tropes the constant marketing of them as a substitute for genuine invention is a troubling one. Potter and his ilk are the spawn of daytime TV and half-remembered nursery tales, rather than any familiarity with actual fantastical literature. It may be churlish to suggest, but I’d be sorely surprised if J.K’s library included anything by Lord Dunsany. Tapping into a culturally bereft society doesn’t gift a work with any greater kudos.

Likewise Twilight is born of a warped, half developed sexuality, a flirting with defiance in the face of the US religious machine, and the deeply unsatisfied and unrealised yearnings of its author. Vampires are the ultimate asexual – the bite representing a non-threatening penetration – that means they are non-threatening romantic partners, perfect grist for the mill of the unsettlingly carried out (if well-intentioned) Chastity movement the books encourage. While virginity and chastity are both admirable qualities, they are very personal ones that shouldn’t be enforced by mass-media or religion; to do so is a backwards step, rather than a liberating one. Here non-sensationalist information is the key, not mass hypnosis.

Most movies try to sell you a tie-in computer game and a McDonald’s happy meal. Twilight tries to sell you morality.

Twilight (And Buffy beforehand, although Weedon at least realised this and had fun with it) is in effect Mills and Boone without the edge. Here there’s no sex, and while there’s haemoglobin aplenty even death is robbed of it’s power.

Author Stephanie Meyer claims the novel is about ‘losing true love’, but has aimed it squarely at a population so cut off from genuine interaction the word becomes meaningless, a substitute for parental affection and an excuse to pretend at the rebellious. In one of the most telling scenes Bella’s ability to commune with Edward is enhanced when she pursues ‘The Dangerous’. In this case, riding a motorcycle – that ever present symbol of disaffection for American youth. Meyer has crafted a work where motorcycles and leather jackets stand-in for danger, where Italy represents the entire planet outside the Midwestern bowl, and where dreaming of wider horizons inevitably leads to terror and sadness-or at least a simulation of it.

New Moon offers an endless curse – one of morbid, flatulent commercialism infecting its victims with a warped feminine ideal where the answer to everything is a good man who doesn’t want to have sex. It has more in common with Mona the Vampire than Dracula – this is sex and death without the sex and death played out by blandly attractive mannequins whose only supernatural power is the height of their hair.

Excited yet?