The last person on earth to see New Moon ventures an opinion :-)

I had a good time going to the free screening of The Twilight Saga: New Moon at the Lawrence Library in Pepperell on Saturday. It was great to get out of the house for a totally recreational, non-goal-oriented reason, and not have to drive for hours to do it! It was such a lovely, mild evening, I walked to the library and back.

The assistant director, Tina McEvoy, is a big vampire fan. She has a life-size standup cut-out of Edward outside her office door, and she did a free screening of Twilight the day it was released. I didn’t attend that time because I was doing a church service the next day–which would have been the case this past weekend if I hadn’t swapped the date for February.

The movie was screened in the downstairs conference room, and Tina ran it on a projector from her laptop. I sat in the front row of chairs, and I had a great view, but the speakers were a little behind me, so I missed bits of the dialogue. I’m sure I’ll see it again. The screening was lightly attended, which was kind of surprising. There were free refreshments, too. Edward greeted us when we came in, with a festive St. Patrick’s Day topper:

I liked the movie. I thought it was well done and a very faithful adaptation of the book. My criticisms mostly arise from exactly that fact: where the movie has flaws and weaknesses, they almost all originate in the book itself. I was particularly impressed with the improvement in Kristen Stewart’s and Rob Pattinson’s performances in this film. I thought they both give much, much better acting jobs, far more natural and emotive and less wooden than in Twilight. Since I doubt that they both got talent implants someplace between movies, I have to give some credit to the director. Of course, New Moon does give both of them a lot more to chew on than Twilight did.

The most effective element of New Moon is the stark change in Jacob after he becomes a werewolf. That’s just really well done–to the point where I kept remembering Bella’s plaint in the books about how much she missed the way Jacob would smile, and I could absolutely understand it. Taylor Lautner has that melting smile up until he changes and after that you just never see it. He really does a good job in this movie. You can just feel the simmering anger in him. He’s a lot scarier than the Volturi! I find the Volturi to be clichéd, two-dimensional and contrived, in the books and the movies, but Jacob is both realistic and convincing, possibly the most true-to-life and fully-developed of all Meyer’s characters (IMHO).

I’m sure this is controversial–I haven’t been reading any fan commentary about this film–but I liked the way the movie ended. I really liked it. Talk about a segue into film 3!

The CGI wolves…well, they’re okay. They’re CGI. Alice’s vision of vamp Bella and Edward frolicking in the woods…yes, that is silly. I’d have made different artistic choices there.

I often found myself wondering how confused a filmgoer who hadn’t read the books would be. There were times when I only knew what was going on because I’d read the book, and I felt the script could have/should have been clearer–for example, just what it is about Edward that the Volturi didn’t want to destroy. It was quite clear why Bella was taking risks to see Edward, but we never find out just why she does see him at those times, and it’s also not quite clear why she jumps off the cliff–in the movie, her motives seem rather muddled at that point. These sorts of loose ends are an occupational hazard of trying to be too faithful to the source material while still constrained for time.

After the movie I walked home, under a dark starry sky with the waxing crescent moon hanging in the west, and the spring peepers trilling in the distance. I didn’t need anything heavier than a denim jacket. It really was a nice evening!