Short Take: If your expectations are in line, expect to be satisfied

Director: Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass, About a Boy)

Screenwriter: Melissa Rosenberg (Twilight, Step Up), Stephenie Meyer (book)

Cast: Kristen Stewart (Adventureland, Twilight, Into the Wild), Robert Pattinson (Twilight, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), Taylor Lautner (Twilight, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D)

Length: 2 hours 10 minutes

Synopsis: Picking up where the last film left off, Bella Swan (Stewart) is still trying to convince her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen (Pattinson) to turn her into a vampire. While celebrating her eighteenth birthday with his vampire family, an accident nearly leads the family to attack Bella. Convinced that the only way to protect her is to leave, Edward and his family depart forever. Bella slips into a depression only lessened when she spends time with her best friend Jacob Black (Lautner). However, Jacob, a werewolf, and Bella slowly cultivate a romance. Just on the point of Jacob and Bella developing a full-fledged relationship, Bella must go to Italy to stop the vampire royalty, the Volturi, from killing Edward.

Opinion: Film franchises adapted from books are usually successful. The Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings franchises testify to that. However, in the cases of those films, the source material was rich and layered, offering a wealth of information from which the creators could glean the most compelling elements. The Twilight Saga has not been so fortunate. Stephenie Meyers’s books are, at best, beach reads that only seem complex when read quickly without much thought or for younger generations with limited experience with love.

The first film in the franchise, Twilight, matched the book’s simplicity. The subpar cinematography, mediocre special effects and dismal dialogue resulted in a film that seemed more parody than loving adaptation. The film looks as if some good-looking Twilight fans had their crazy hippie Mom, played by Catherine Hardwicke, direct their own adaptation and posted it on YouTube. While it may not have been a quality film, it was the most unintentionally funny film of 2008.

This time around, Chris Weitz directs and while his style is far steadier, if a bit less creative, than Hardwicke’s, he is still unable to rise above the source material. He has made a highly entertaining film that should please just about everyone as long as they don’t expect something too emotionally complex.

It doesn’t take long to realize that just on a cinematic level, Weitz has made a better film. Weitz’s images have a richness that is not only more absorbing, but closer to the Meyers’s descriptions. He utilizes make-up and costuming to better effect making the vampires look paler and more beautiful than in the first film. While Hardwicke used cold, washed-out colors, Weitz make his as vibrant as possible. The climactic scenes in Italy, where a green and blue clad Bella runs through a square dominated by bright yellows and reds, offer some of the most visually stunning and interesting shots in the film. The special effects are equally interesting. While the super speed running was depicted to comic effect in the first film, Weitz, and his greatly expanded budget, actually succeed in making the CGI action impressive. Scenes where muscular, half-naked Jacob morphs into a wolf are almost believable.

The acting has also improved. Kristen Stewart offered the strongest performance in the first film and is even stronger here. She plays a manic-depressive well and perfectly portrays Bella’s desperation when she begs Edward and later Jacob not to leave. Taylor Lautner also displays a surprising talent, though perhaps not as strong as Stewart’s, believably rendering Jacob’s anger and yearning in the aforementioned break up scene. Even Robert Pattinson, whose forced intensity led to some of the biggest laughs in the first film, delivers an acceptable performance. He is certainly aided by the fact that his character is absent for most of the film.

Despite improvement in all categories, a few moments still hark back to the first film’s ridiculousness. The first comes when Jacob removes his shirt to dab at Bella’s head wound. The moment doesn’t come from the book, but it’s in the same dime romance vein. Also in that same vein is a scene from the lovers’ future in which vampire Bella runs with Edward, in slow motion no less, through the woods. For some reason they wear out of date clothing and though Stewart’s stunning beauty nearly saves the scene, the clothing already ruined the mood.

While Weitz succeeds in making a better film, New Moon’s cheap romance origins don’t allow him to entirely transcend the source material’s clichés. However, as long as audiences go into the film expecting an entertaining and clichéd teen romance with cool action, they won’t be disappointed.

Rating: 8.0