The first Twilight film wasn't exactly a hit with the critics – Peter Bradshaw and Xan Brooks's trend-bucking notwithstanding – but the teen vampire romance based on the popular novel by Stephenie Meyers did incredibly well at the box office, racking up $382m (£233m) worldwide. Shortly afterwards, producers Summit Entertainment parted company with director Catherine Hardwicke after the latter said she could not turn around the sequel, New Moon, in the short time that was being demanded.
Hardwicke, who also directed teen drama Thirteen and skating documentary Lords of Dogtown, reportedly cited the difficulty of producing convincing CGI in haste for certain sequences in the followup, which focuses on a rival clan of werewolves. Instead, Summit, fearing fans of the first film would lose interest in the interim, charged Chris Weitz (who made the 2007 adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass) with bringing the second film to the screen within a year of Twilight's release.
Weitz, if the first trailer for New Moon is indicative, has found a novel way to bypass those complicated, CGI-heavy lycanthrope transformation scenes: instead of showing a man changing slowly into a wolf, he shows a man leaping into the air and landing as a wolf, omitting the actual transformation bit completely. Clever, huh?
This isn't the only reason why New Moon, out on 20 November in the US and a week later here, might be the single most missable movie of 2009. The lingering glances and brooding stares which constituted the performances of Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) and vampire lover Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in the first movie are back, as are the Gap model bloodsuckers. And the wolf, once it does land, looks slightly less terrifying than an angry chihuahua.
Of course, New Moon only has to appeal to fans of Meyers's novels and the first movie, as well as teenage girls who presumably like to imagine Pattinson desperately trying to stop himself from ravaging their own tender necks. But it would be nice if the whole project wasn't so, well, bloodless. What do you make of this one?
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