Is New Moon really worth the money?

Before reading this post, a few things to keep in mind about me:
1. I am not a Twilight fan. I read all the books but I can't say I liked them. Especially after the first book, the rest of the series just kind of disgusted me.
2. I am a teenage girl and so although I cut a LOT of details about Taylor Lautner, I still have a decently large paragraph about him.

Photo credit goes to Summit Entertainment

According to The Wall Street Journal, New Moon now holds the new record as the largest opening-day box office gross on record of $72.7 million. That beat the record of The Dark Knight as well as Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen. With that being said, was the movie actually that good?

When the movie started, it started out with Bella (played by Kristen Stewart) narrating with her monotone voice. After five minutes of blah blah blah, we see her running through a huge mob of people and then bam. Next scene. While everyone’s trying to figure out what happened in the scene that they just saw, we see Bella with the love her life, Edward (played by Robert Pattinson) and some old lady. We finally realize that this is her grandma when she says “grandma” after ten minutes of an even more confused audience, but when she gets closer and closer to her grandma, she realizes that she is looking in the mirror and that the old lady is actually her.

She wakes up from this nightmare, and of course people who haven’t read New Moon sit and scratch their head. Bella is then joined by her dad who brings her birthday presents because she has finally turned eighteen, and she responds by complaining because she doesn’t want to celebrate getting older and older. (Seriously Bella??? You just turned eighteen.) Not your typical teenage daughter.

Enough with the great beginning of the movie. Plot time! In New Moon, Edward leaves Bella because he doesn’t “want her anymore” and then Bella copes with her loneliness by sleeping in the woods and having really disturbing nightmares where she screams her head off like she’s giving birth or something. Then we meet Jacob Black (played by Taylor Lautner) and now that Edward is no longer around, Jacob becomes an important character and he and Bella become best friends. When we first see him in the movie, he still has his long girl hair and so all the girls are “oh… gross.”

However, the scene with the motorcycle ride, which seems to be in all the versions of the trailers, where Bella gets hurt because she doesn’t actually know how to ride a motorcycle and bumps her head onto a rock that just inconveniently happens to be there, he finally takes his shirt off for the first time, and when I went to see it, someone in the back actually screamed. Not one of those fake “woo” screams but like a legit lady scream. (I say lady scream because it definitely wasn’t a teenage girl who screamed) The scream was met up with the wolf whistles, the “ow ows!” in the later scenes when he finally got a haircut and walked around without a shirt on, and I realized that every time he came on the screen without a shirt, there was always some reaction of that sort but if you see the movie, you will know that it is very well-deserved.

Back to the movie. The rest of the movie is just kind of eh… I remember watching the first movie and laughing a lot at the awkward and awful acting between Bella and Edward but because Edward really isn’t in this movie a lot, we get left with Bella and her one-expression face throughout the whole movie. They tried to add humor to this movie by adding some corny lines, but it didn’t really make the movie funny.

Personally, I found this movie boring when Taylor Lautner wasn’t in the scenes. I kept looking at my watch and around the theater. The whole scene where Bella goes to the Volturi to save Edward from killing himself (you have to watch the movie to find out why) felt really long, and to boys who go to see this movie, this is the only action scene in this movie with real people (the rest of the action is pretty much between the animated werewolves).

We also see Dakota Fanning later on as one of the powerful vampires and we say “woah! Someone actually famous is in this movie” but we find out that Bella’s ditzy friend from school that we don’t know the name of is in this movie longer than Dakota. I’ll stop talking about the movie now because I don’t want to give the whole thing away.

Speaking of visuals, the movie makers did a better job with the visual effects. The whole Edward hallucinations just look creepy, but the werewolves look better. I still laugh when they show Edward “glowing” in the sunlight because it just looks like he’s sweating a lot but with the other vampires, the red contacts look really scary but it fits.

IMDB.com rates this movie 4.5 out of 10 and I must say that I give the movie itself maybe like 2, but because of Taylor Lautner it ends up being like 5 out of 10. You must all think that I’m really obsessed with Taylor Lautner, but really why else did you go see the movie (unless you were dragged by your girlfriend)? You can’t expect the movie to actually be good especially if you saw all the horrible acting from the first movie and I thought that the crazy book fans didn’t go see the movies because it ruins the images of characters that people already have in their head prior to the movie.

Any girls who were going to wait till this movie comes out on DVD, don’t. Those abs just won’t look the same on your television screen unless you have a gigantic television. The movie itself isn’t worth the rental fee, so if you don’t want to spend like $9 on a movie ticket, watch it in the dollar theater when it comes out. I will not recommend this movie to guys because there’s really nothing in the movie worth your time but to gals, go watch it. You don’t need to read the book. Just read over a quick summary and go watch the movie!