Article by:Tom Logan

Twilight, or as it should be known, The Adventures of Mary-Sue and Sparkles the Vampire, is an over-hyped piece of literary garbage written by Stephanie Meyer about a young girl that falls in love with a vampire…. that sparkles. New Moon (Summit Entertainment, 2009), the second book in the Twilight saga has recently been released into theaters. To answer the first and obvious question, yes the movie does indeed follow the book, unfortunately this isn’t a particularly good thing.

First of all, the movie had almost no like-able characters. The protagonist, Bella Swan, was a whiny, self-centered brat that couldn’t function properly without a boyfriend in her life, going so far as to endanger her own life over a guy that dumped her. She leads on her friend Jacob (the only likeable character in the entire movie) but then immediately runs back to Sparkles (a.k.a. Edward Cullen), the second he shows back up in her life. Edward, the love interest in this crap-fest, was absent from most of the movie. The only times he ever really shows up is when Bella is risking her life and he advises her against it in ghost form. The minor characters in this movie were all superficial and, for the most part, irrelevant.

Another big problem in this movie is the acting. Kristen Stewart is once again displaying her almighty singular facial expression. Robert Pattinson looks like a cross-breed between a homeless man and a corpse. Taylor Lautner was by far the best actor, which is not saying very much since he tends to switch between very happy, very sad, and very angry and frustrated. Also, in some of the dialogues, the characters weren’t even looking at each other. Not to mention the script read like a bad soap opera.

The plot of this movie sucked mostly because nothing really happened in this movie. Edward dumps Bella, she cries about it, starts a “just friends but I also kind of like you” relationship with Jacob (a.k.a. being a tease), then goes running back to Edward. There was something about a vampire named Victoria that wanted to kill Bella but that never really went anywhere. Then again, this is Stephanie Meyer, so it’s really not surprising that this movie had little to no conflict in it. Also some parts of the movie just seemed wrong and unnatural. Like when Bella discovers that Jacob is part of a werewolf pack, a supposed secret that no one could ever know about, the other members of the pack act very nonchalant like it was no big deal. The werewolves themselves weren’t anything special either. When one thinks of werewolves they expect a half-human, half-wolf hybrid. Instead, what you get is….really big, regular-looking wolves. But then again this is Stephanie Meyer and if someone can ruin vampires with the notion that they “sparkle” in the sunlight, then it’s also not hard to believe that they would ruin werewolves as well.

So in the end, the only people that will probably end up liking this movie are Twilight fans and they’ll probably see it regardless of what people say about the movie. For everyone else this movie is a crappy romance movie and an even crappier vampire story.