Directed by: Chris Weitz
Starring: Billy Burke, Dakota Fanning, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson, Michael Sheen, Kristen Stewart
Rating: PG-13

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson star in The Twilight Sage: New Moon. (Courtesy photo)

Folks, this Twilight phenomenon can’t be dismissed. The second screen adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s massively successful vampires-and-werewolves romance saga exploded into theaters over the weekend, shattering nearly every box office record along the way.

New Moon is not a well-made movie. I haven’t read the books (I intend to on the proper rainy weekend), but I assume the adaptation must be fairly reverential. Otherwise there might be riots. Regardless, the story is a jumbled mess, directed with the molasses touch of Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass). It’s also outrageously entertaining—sometimes intentionally so.

If you haven’t been paying attention, you may not know that Bella (Kristen Stewart) moved to Forks, Wash., to be with her quiet-sheriff father Charlie (Billy Burke). There she fell in love with Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), and met his foster family of baseball-loving vampires. Now she and Edward are trying to make it work—what with her being only 17, while he’s 109 and damned.

After many gasping pauses and meaningful looks, Edward and his family leave, throwing Bella into a three-month funk. She’s pulled out of it by friend Jake (Taylor Lautner), who has put on a lot of muscle since the previous school year. He also has begun hanging out with a new group of guys who love cliff-jumping and turning into werewolves. In one of the few surprises of the series, these werewolves stand about six feet tall at the shoulder. The law of conservation of energy aside, it’s a cool effect. It’s not yet clear why Bella is such a draw to the monster type, but she and Jake become very close.

There’s a whole second chunk to the story, involving Edward and some powerful vampires in Italy, led by Michael Sheen (Underworld, The Queen) and Dakota Fanning (War of the Worlds). It expands the scope of the series out of the Pacific Northwest, simultaneously forging a more grand mythology and exposing how utterly thin it all is.

The real story is the love triangle. We may not doubt who Bella will ultimately choose, but it’s nice that both fellows are worth rooting for. It’s a deliriously impossible choice for so many rabid Twilighters out there: the cheerier, far buffer young werewolf, or the pale, skinny, and spectacularly broody vampire?

Nobody is aiming for high art, or even a true film, it seems. New Moon is more a collection of carefully presented translations of key events. As you see these moments, you can almost hear the producers whispering in your ear “Did we do okay?” For the most part, the answer from audiences has been yes.

And I can’t disagree. Nearly everything about New Moon that could be criticized may be exactly what was intended. The stars struggle mightily to make Melissa Rosenberg’s risible dialogue sound believable. You could drive entire Abbott & Costello routines through some of the dramatic pauses these actors take. The music by Alexandre Desplat is as grimly self-important as Javier Aguiressarobe’s cinematography. But anything else would be nothing short of an apology for a movie that has nothing to apologize for.

Stewart may not impress you much here, but she works something just short of a miracle by straight-facing her way through these movies. She remains a talent to watch. Pattinson struggles far more—you can tell he craves something more substantial. Whether or not he’ll be able to pull off such material remains to be seen. Lautner is a lot younger than the other two, and it shows. But like his co-stars, Lautner is very easy to like. Burke is solid, and Sheen and Fanning add some pep in Italy. Sheen seems to have watched Gary Oldman’s Dracula a few times.

If you have no desire to see New Moon, feel free to stay home. But if you’re curious, you may have a good time—especially in an enthusiastic crowd. (This is one movie where you need to embrace a vocal audience.) There isn’t a truly frightening moment in either film—and believe me, I’m very easy to scare.

But what is really disturbing about this whole Twilight thing is how chaste it is. In spite of the heaving and panting of millions of teenage girls, Twilight almost completely de-sexualizes the most sexual of all monsters. Then something very frightening happens on the very last line of New Moon. I won’t repeat it, but rest assured it’s creepy in a far more disturbing way than any vampire or werewolf-inflicted carnage.

The Twilight saga is fun and silly and romantic in a perfect pre-teen way, but there is an underlying Puritanism that may be the real terror.