Nov/092
New Moon: Depressed & Boring
I really wanted to like this movie. Young love is always romantic. You can’t get a better romantic obstacle than being in love with a vampire. He’s dead and he wants to eat you. And the conflict between vampires and werewolves is cool. I only read the first book of the TWILIGHT series. One of my friends I saw the movie with assured me that NEW MOON is the weakest of the books. The weakness of the source material was evident in the blandness of the movie. The filmmakers were in a bind. If they changed the story, even slightly to make it a better movie, they risked alienating the rabid fans. A book and a movie are two very different mediums for story. When adapting a book, the writer must balance staying true to the material with story choices that make an entertaining and compelling movie. Sometimes you can’t change much and you end up with a movie that has a book’s pacing. Things that are interesting in a book, like Bella being depressed, are boring in a movie. In a book we can spend pages with Bella’s innermost thoughts as she struggles with her heartache. In the movie Bella doesn’t crack a smile for two hours. I had compassion for Bella’s broken heart, but watching her mope around was boring. She was so shut down. I didn’t understand why Edward and Jacob were in love with her.
It is very difficult to build a movie around a depressed character, especially a mainstream movie. Dealing with the darkness of depression has a more indie feel like LEAVING LAS VEGAS. I’m not suggesting that characters can’t be sad and troubled – that’s what makes great conflict. But think twice about making your protagonist so depressed that she is almost non-functioning like Bella. Find a way to make the heartache interesting visually and to keep the tension going. The pacing was almost non-existent in NEW MOON, making for a very long two hours.
Despite these problems, judging by the screams in my theater and the boffo boxoffice, the Twilighters were ecstatic. The writer and director gave them just what they wanted – a faithful recreation of the book with all of its pitfalls.