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  The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Summit
Directed by Chris Weitz
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson
Purchase Online
Official Website

The Short: The acting is better, the direction is better, and the movie's better too. New Moon is superior to the first Twilight movie in pretty much everyway. It still made thousands of boyfriends cringe on date night.

Every female from the age of 13-27 in the U.S. is obsessed with vampires thanks to the Twilight series. It's even turned into its own genre of movies and books. Now there's a vampire genre. Figure that one out. Whenever something like that happens. Whenever vampires become their own genre of anything you have to give it up to the source material. In this case it's Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series. The books have been adapted to movies and while they haven't been received as well as the books have been, they've been received well enough. They've done awesome at the box office and the soundtracks have broken sales records. The movie has sold amazingly well digitally as well. In fact, the Twilight movies can be considered as the first real dominate digital franchise. The point is... this Twilight thing is an obsession for many and that's because it's a great story. The first movie was a little shaky. It was kind of like the producers and the actors were kind of just testing the waters to see how things were going to work. Some of the actors in the first movie weren't great and the direction of the movie wasn't as good as it could have been. Because of that Chris Weitz was brought on board to direct New Moon and the result of that was a better looking movie, a better acted movie, and an altogether better movie experience.

In the first movie the acting was the main problem. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are both future stars if they're not considered to be already. They weren't solid in performance in the first movie, they were a little dry for the material it was hard to get into. That said, Stewart was better than I thought she would be. And since I thought Pattinson was your prototypical Brit thespian, he was far worse than I expected him to be. Nonetheless, that's been fixed here. They both have good performances in New Moon and it's easier to get into both of their characters. Taylor Lautner plays Jacob Black in the series and while he was decent sized in the first movie he apparently went to the Mark McGwire conditioning school and got huge for New Moon. Like the other two stars of the movie, his performance was a little weak in the first movie. This time around he's better but he still has a few terrible moments in the script where the other two stars were stellar throughout.

The second book in the Twilight saga was kind of the boring story out of the four books. There wasn't a lot going on- just a lot of Bella missing Edward. That's why this movie is better than the book. Instead of reading over and over about how much Bella misses Edward we see how she's missing him much better. It's better to see something like that instead of reading it over and over. The other parts of the book were adapted well for this movie. The CGI for the werewolves was better than what everybody hoped for. And they made the Volturi... the vampire mob so to speak, very well. They're creepy and they're lair is creepy, pretty much everything you could hope for with the Volturi was reached.

As with any release that's a s big as this there are several different releases. This particular review was done on the single-disc edition Blu-Ray of the movie. The special features contain a commentary with director Chris Weitz, a documentary on making the movie, and some awesome music features including a rehearsal video of Muse and music videos for Death Cab, Anya Marina, and Mutemath.

New Moon was a superior movie to Twilight in every way. The first movie was kind of like a test spin for the franchise. With New Moon it appears that it's going to start coming into its own. The next movie is set up well with New Moon and it should make for the best movie out of the four books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Purchase Soundtrack
The soundtracks to these movies are almost as popular as the movies themselves. The first soundtrack featured a couple of new Paramore tracks as well as Linkin Park and Collective Soul. With this soundtrack the supervisors took a more modern approach to the alternative genre. Featuring songs by Band of Skulls and Death Cab for Cutie this second soundtrack was embraced by fans and critics alike.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


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