Last night was the release of Eclipse, the third movie in the Twilight franchise. Theaters were packed; Team Edward/Jacob loyalties ran high; anticipatory squeals filled the air.

The movie that unfolded wasn’t worth any of it.

This has gone beyond cinematic “worth” in the context of inscrutable teen tastes, or a shift in the zeitgeist, or any of the other trends that set their intended audience alight while mystifying everyone outside their demographic. This is about a two-hour movie that has to pull its bookend voiceover into the film to explain plot points it never shows, as the camera pans over a lengthy establishing shot of a forest.

…More than once.

The trend is distinct. Twilight will never be mistaken for a classic (it’s a decent teen flick and a terrible vampire movie), but for all its flaws it’s actually a movie; it has a cinematic vocabulary and a story with a beginning, middle, and end. New Moon was less coherent (though mercifully less blue), more a collection of filmed scenes from the book than a movie in its own right, and it killed time between halfhearted dialogue and CGI fight scenes by blasting its soundtrack as loudly as possible. But Eclipse, which has arguably the most movie-friendly source material of all four books, somehow manages to be the least cohesive, most awkwardly-assembled installment yet.

Why the decline?

First, to better understand the downward slide this franchise has taken, know that a character who has been speaking a regionless accent for two and a half films has a flashback to his time in the Confederate army, and carries the Texas drawl forward with him for the rest of the movie. This is the kind of decision which several people have to sign off on. It is the kind of decision which requires on-set maintenance. Eclipse is the kind of movie in which this decision makes it to the final cut.

With that general quality control in mind, let’s look at some likely factors for the slide.

The first and foremost reasoning is that truly spectacular adaptations of bad literature are rare, and so the movies can only be expected to be as good as the source material. That actually gets the movies a pass on nearly everything (the vacuous and off-putting Bella from the films still somehow manages to top the version in the books). This helps explain why Twilight worked where it did, since it had the initial tension between its romantic leads. It also explains a lot of the problems with New Moon; when your primary romantic lead drops off the scene for 400 pages and your secondary lead had less than a dozen lines in the last movie, good luck carrying that narrative tension. (Also, here is a vampire bureaucracy. You’re welcome.)

However, of all four movies, Eclipse is working with something closest to a real plot: the vengeful Victoria creates an army of newborn vampires (better, stronger, faster than they were before!) to pick off the Cullens; the overseeing Volturi are forced to get involved, which puts human Bella in danger; the werewolf pack and the Cullens face off; and Jacob and Edward both make their claims on Bella’s heart as the final battle barrels down on them.

And yet, with all this cross-antagonism and potential intrigue, the movie flounders as soon as Edward and Bella appear onscreen, and makes little attempt to carry any further tension. (There are several lengthy scenes of characters talking about how they will eventually have to make a decision. Adventure!)

Eclipse does have its almost-accidental moment of real fun, when a grinning Jasper leads a werewolf training session on how to beat the crap out of a vampire, and uses various family members as crash test dummies to demonstrate techniques. Like Twilight’s vampire baseball, or New Moon’s werewolf pursuit of Victoria, the scene transcends the plodding plot and becomes, for a moment, a movie about the thrill of being supernatural. (And, like the scenes in its predecessors, that moment does not last long.)

Those oddly-synchronous moments aside, the disparate list of directors who have helmed these outings are part of the quality problem. Even in the Harry Potter films, which have each made an attempt to be a standalone and engaging piece of cinema, the final product varies wildly by director, and that was with a list of directors who were picked with apparent deliberation, after the scope of the phenomenon was known.

Catherine Hardwicke probably remains the best choice that could have been made for Twilight. Having already made a claustrophobic teen movie or two, she knew her material, and at the time of filming the book had not quite caught fire; everyone involved was ostensibly making a cult movie based on a YA book. (We all know how that turned out.) Chris Weitz, director of the floptacular Golden Compass, was reportedly brought in at the last minute after Hardwicke and Summit couldn’t agree on a production schedule for New Moon, which might help explain the slapdash effects. But David Slade is the man behind the intense 30 Days of Night and the even more intense Hard Candy; with that resume it seems bizarre that we ended up with a movie as milquetoast as Eclipse.

But the most likely answer to the series’ decline, and a sad truth in any case, is that it no longer matters to anyone involved how bad the movies are. The core audience is so wide and so devoted that questions of quality simply don’t apply. If you are seeing a Twilight movie in all sincerity, then you want to see a list of your favorite scenes brought to life on the screen, and the franchise’s only goal now is to provide them. Those who come looking for craftsmanship, or even coherence, will starve.

The good news is that if you are seeing a Twilight movie to mock it, you’ll feast every time.

[This piece originally appeared on Tor.com]

On the heels of Warner Brothers’ gothic take on Little Red Riding Hood, Paramount has landed a dark fairy tale of its own. It’s pushing Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters into production, with a projected release in 2011. Producer Adam McKay promises “a steampunk vibe mixed with a little bit of a goth edge and hyper-cartoon violence.”

A dark steampunk retelling of a classic fairy tale? What could go wrong?

In completely unrelated news, McKay also revealed to MTV that producers have approached members of the cast of the Twilight films about starring.

Under the cut, some wild speculation. (The nice thing about a cast of three hundred people under 25 means you can get a pretty decent betting pool going if you put your mind to it.)

The film, co-written and set to be directed by Tommy Wirkola (lighthearted Nazi-zombie flick Dead Snow), seems like the sort of high-concept vehicle that could support an under-the-radar cast, like Kick-Ass (mentioned frequently in the interview by a clearly-jazzed McKay). On the other hand, show me something that wouldn’t benefit from the built-in Twilight fandom and I will pass out from shock, so there’s sound logic behind courting your Cullens of choice.

The question is: which ones?

The franchise’s two most bankable stars—Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson—have been scrabbling for artsy period pieces and gritty indie dramas just to escape typecasting, which they will have to continue to do for the next two hundred years before people stop referring to them as Bella and Edward, so the chances of them being up for a stunt-heavy fairy-tale witchfest together are slim.

More attainably, Jackson Rathbone seems to be the cast’s dark horse in terms of fan appeal, and will probably gather more fans after The Last Airbender is released. Bonus: his slate hasn’t quite filled up for the year, so they might actually be able to snag him. Double bonus: by then, he should be plenty used to the stunts.

For Gretel, it seems like a no-contest for Dakota Fanning—and it might not even be a lost cause. (Hey, she did Push.) If she turns it down, though, I’d say the next best thing would be Rachelle Lefevre, who was unceremoniously dumped from Eclipse. She has more screen presence than most of the Backup Cullens, and at least she doesn’t have the Twilight scheduling worries any more.

Though it sounds like Hansel and Gretel has its sights set on the biggest stars it can get. Says McKay, “It’s such a great script that I have a feeling people are going to be dying to play roles in it. Also, the witches are awesome in it. Nasty, mean witches, and we’ll get some great actresses for them as well.” (Finally, the actresses over thirty will have something to do!)

We’ll be keeping tabs on this one as it goes into production, since it would be great to have a steampunk fable that doesn’t end up like The Brothers Grimm. And if you can’t wait for a dark-fairy-tale fix, SyFy’s version of Hansel and Gretel is due in just a few months, which should be plenty to whet your appetite.

[This piece originally appeared at Tor.com.]

Little Red Riding Hood, the original story about a girl and a wolf meeting cute, is getting a new, romantic retelling from Warner Brothers. If you think that this is not an attempt to use its metaphorical teeth to take a bite-related pun out of Twilight’s success, then you have never seen a movie before.

Naturally, anything as phenomenally popular as Twilight is going to spawn a subgenre; since Twilight can basically print its own money by now, there’s no point in straying too far from the proven concept. Warner Brothers has even hired Twilight’s Catherine Hardwicke herself to direct, which is such a genius move I can hardly believe it. (Summit released her from her contract before filming began on New Moon, citing scheduling difficulties, a move that, given fan reception of New Moon, might have been a mistake.) Of all the big-and small-screen Twilight spinoffs that have been put into production, scoring Hardwicke might be the single best move any of them has made.

They’ve kept up the good work by casting Amanda Seyfried as the young lady in the red hood. This is a bonus for two reasons: firstly, she’s a much better actress than Kristen Stewart (who I am hoping will pleasantly surprise us all in The Runaways); secondly, she has a pretty big resume that mixes indie projects (Veronica Mars, Big Love) with blockbuster cred (Dear John, the execrable Mamma Mia!). This box-office track record both neatly maximizes the target audience and gives her a buffer against typecasting.

The story itself has the same potential any fairy tale has, and the same pitfalls. Writer David Johnson is coming off the heels of last year’s other young-girls-are-secretly-terrifying thriller, Orphan, which is good or bad news depending on how much you believe the camp in Orphan was intentional.

(A brief tangent about adapting this particular tale. Orphan’s Esther seems like a prototype of the Riding Hood Warner Brothers is going for, an unsettling and sexualized young woman; unfortunately for Johnson, “unsettling and sexualized” is a nutshell description of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, a previous (excellent) retelling of Red Riding Hood that’s going to be tough to top. If it’s a modern spin, things will be easier for him; he’s been beaten to the punch by Hard Candy, which is about as dark as it gets, but is not a genre flick; plus, Hard Candy is the least romantic movie ever made, so whatever romance Johnson can manage will have room to breathe. Okay, time in!)

We’re still awaiting casting news of any human or beastly love interests; I’m guessing two, one of each, and neither old enough to rent a car, just because there’s going to be a lot more love triangle and a lot less psychological horror if Warner Brothers is going for the audience as directly as appearances would suggest.

This is clearly a cut above the upcoming SyFy disasters, but for now, all this news has done is make me want to go home and pull out my DVD of In the Company of Wolves.

[this piece originally appeared on Tor.com.]

Please note: in the interest of thoroughness, this post is epically long. My bad.

The line was smaller than last year (because we went to a smaller theatre), and we stood calmly in the back-and-forth of velvet ropes. For an hour and a half. (Hint: after an hour and a half, no line is calm.)

At 11:55, the theatre door opened and people streamed out. One of them was carrying a life-size Jacob cutout, which she had to hold over her head as she stepped over the ropes to the exit, because people kept reaching out to touch it. She totally beaned at least four people on her way out. When someone asked, politely, “Where did you get that?” she grinned and smarmed, “Early screening. Invitation only,” and swanned down the escalator.

At the realization that the theatre had scheduled an advance screening that didn’t let out until five minutes before their intended screening, the volume level rose sharply.

When, ten minutes later, the theatre doors opened again, there was a stampede.

Women leapt over the velvet ropes, elbowing one another out of the way. Screams erupted as people got smacked. Sharp shouts of “Hey! HEY!” came from people near the front of the line, who were trying not to get trampled by the wave of people. Someone tripped, and was tripped over. Someone screamed, “Watch my poster!”

It was over in maybe twenty seconds, but holy shit, you guys, those fans are NOT KIDDING.

And then it was time for the movie.

We begin with Bella having a dream about being older and not as hot as Edward. Please note that even in the dream, Edward still loves her very much; she just wakes up screaming because she’s going to get old and lose her looks. Your heroine, ladies and gentlemen!

Then her dad, Charlie, appears in the doorway and is like, “Happy birthday!” Bella grumps, “I thought we said no presents.” Charlie holds out a camera, looking like he regrets ever agreeing to have a child.

Bella’s reply: “Wow, this is actually really great.” ACTUALLY really great. As opposed to all the other shitty stuff he’s gotten her, like the bedroom furnishings and a truck so she wouldn’t be dependent on him for transportation. Man, it’s really sad she never gets eaten, you know?

Then she goes to school and says hello to the humans briefly before her boyfriend shows up. The human teens are hilarious for their two seconds, and even more so because when Edward shows up they all literally roll their eyes and leave, because they know this couple is totally useless. Then Edward allows Bella to speak with Jacob (!), and she asks when he’s going to join the main high school with the “palefaces” (!!). Score another point for the humans!

[...you guys.]

Also, Edward and Bella have a relationship where they only ever talk about their relationship, which is staggeringly boring just to be in, much less to have to WATCH, so they sit in the back of English class and he talks about how much he wishes he could commit suicide, and she threatens him that if he ever does that she’ll kill herself, too, and I JUST WANT A MOVIE ABOUT THE HUMAN TEENS, OKAY? I want them all to team up with Charlie and solve cute mysteries. That is all I want.

But no! Instead we get a birthday party thrown by the Cullens (which Bella HATES because it makes her feel OLD and UNATTRACTIVE and OLD), and while opening one of her presents she gets a paper cut, and Jasper is overwhelmed with her blood and tries to eat her.

Sadly, he does not succeed, and Edward realizes, like a puppy finding a toad in a basket of towels, that something’s not right, and he wants to protect Bella forever.

So he dumps her and leaves town. Your hero, ladies and gents!

Bella spends the next thirty minutes of the movie having epic sulks and screaming nightmares. (Never have I seen a character so desperately in need of a hobby. Plus, I guess it’s lucky that Forks doesn’t have a high crime rate, so the Chief of Police can be sleep-deprived for months without anything bad happening.) The movie desperately tries to draw a Romeo and Juliet parallel, forgetting that the reason Juliet’s suffering is bearable is because she drops dead from poison a few minutes into her hissy. Sadly, no one poisons Bella.

When her dad suggests she gets help (a very caring parental suggestion for someone clearly in the midst of depression), it’s painted as Dads Totally Do Not Understand How Love Works, and Dad No Longer Wants What is Best For Me, Like Those Musical Montages of Me Staring Out the Window as the Camera Spins, Which are Super Hip and Therefore Therapeutic.

In an attempt to fool her father, she goes to the movies with Jessica, who awesomely points out that Bella is a) no fun and B) totally selfish and ungrateful. Then Bella realizes that when she accepts rides from strange bikers, she sees a floating vision of her hot boyfriend, and is stoked. Jessica is mortified, because Jessica has the sense God gave a hamster.

Bella decides to take advantage of her friend Jacob by pretending she likes him a lot so he will fix a motorcycle for her so she can try to crash it and, in the moment before injury, see a glimpse of her boyfriend again.

Girl, GET A HOBBY. Knitting is nice! Everyone likes knitting! Hell, even fixing your own fucking deathcycle is a hobby, right?

Whatever. There’s a montage of him fixing bikes and her throwing pizza slices at him (no, seriously, she throws pizza at him and he catches it, because that’s what teenagers do when they hang out). Then they take the bikes out, and she crashes at two miles an hour, and he runs to save her and rips his shirt off to stop her head from bleeding. (First aid is different in the Pacific Northwest, I guess.) Bella is stunned by his beauty (I am not making this up), and from this glimpse of his chest she decides she Likes Him, Too.

Brief pause: How on earth are we supposed to be rooting for the most ungrateful, selfish, boring, shallow heroine in all of literature, exactly?

What follows is a chastefest of interrupted kisses and increasingly disturbing male posturing, because Jacob is a WOLF, a wild sexual WOLF, don’t you SEE? So on one side is Edward the Hovering Dad, who appears whenever Bella’s thinking of doing something dangerous, so he can scold her for not keeping that promise she never made while he was breaking up with her. On the other side is Jacob, whose werewolf aggression manifests in him getting possessive over her like she’s a pig’s ear.

Best scene about this: Mike asks Bella on a date (he offers to take her to “Love Spelled Backwards is Love,” which is by far the best line in the movie). She does that thing where she includes everyone (ouch), and then only Jacob and Mike and Bella actually show. Ouch. Also, smart of those other people to stay away, because seriously, I would not want to hang around Bella either. Mike gets sick from the violence and goes to throw up. He is mercilessly mocked by Jacob and Bella for not being strong enough to handle gore. While Mike is gone, Jacob tells Bella he likes her that way. When she gently declines, he starts in with the shit where he’s never going to stop trying, no matter what, and because Bella has all the deductive power of a snow pea, she somehow thinks this is comforting and not probably cause for a restraining order.

When Mike comes out of the bathroom, Jacob is pissed he interrupted Jacob’s moves on Bella and tries to start a fight. Mike is like, “I just threw up, this makes no sense, see you later, I SAID GOOD DAY SIR,” and gets the fuck out of there, because he realizes that even if these people are the heroes of their own dramas, they are a bunch of immature assholes who should be avoided. TEAM MIKE.

[Mike's facial expression is all our facial expressions!]

After this it all becomes one appalling blur, with the exception of the scene I keep talking about where Victoria, on the hunt for Bella, is chased by the werewolves. The thing is, at the time, it was so fucking glorious not to have any dialogue, and to have decent music and cinematography, that I felt like it was an Amazing Movie Moment. It is, in fact, not. It is the equivalent of crawling through mud for two hours, and then finding an agate. Worth almost nothing on the scale of real gems, but much nicer than mud!

Bella decides to be a werewolf girlfriend with the same ego-swallowing gusto she decided to be a vampire girlfriend, even after she meets Emily, the girlfriend of the pack leader (and not a werewolf because ladies stay at home and cook FOR werewolves instead, because Stephenie Meyer is just a walking psychological quagmire). Emily has a slashed-up face from that time she made her boyfriend angry and he turned into a werewolf and SLASHED HER FACE. Jacob explains this to Bella and wraps up with, “I couldn’t take it if that happened,” because his guilt would CLEARLY be the worst thing about SLASHING UP HIS GIRLFRIEND’S FACE, STEPHENIE MEYER, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Alice finally shows up to take Bella to find Edward, because Alice had a vision of Bella falling off a cliff, which she did, and maybe dying, which she almost did in a nice perfume-ad way before Jacob saved her, and Alice wanted to see if it was true.

It’s not true! Alice pretends to be relieved. Then she realizes that Edward read her mind, and thinks Bella is dead, and they have to get to Italy before he kills himself, which apparently he won’t do for several days, since they have time to take a plane trip (on VIRGIN AIRLINES AHAHAHAHAH oh my god) to Italy and steal a car and drive to this little village in the middle of nowhere where apparently the world’s most powerful vampires have decided to settle forever, because escape routes are for dorks.

Naturally, Bella saves Edward from stepping out into the sun and possibly being seen by humans thus requiring his ritual slaughter by the enforcers of the powerful vampires who will kill him if they find out he has stepped into the sun as an appeal to their previous refusal to kill him (Edward likes complicated plans). Then she cries into his glittery, mildly hairy chest, explaining her terror when she thought he might be dead. “I can’t think,” she wheedles earnestly, and then drops off into a silence so significant that she might as well be saying, “…ever.” CORRECT.

Then they all go down and talk to the people who signed on for this movie because it meant a free trip to Italy. There’s a brief fight between Edward and the enforcer vampire, which is at least better moviemaking than the escalators and fast-forward button used in Twilight, because this is filmed in brief glimpses of people and then a smoky effect as if they are too fast for the eye. But also in Twilight Alice got to rip the bad guy’s head off, and in this one she’s subdued in two seconds and never even tries to struggle free, so, way to be a scary vampire, anyone but Edward and that one other guy!

(Also, to make up for all the Jacob chest, they pull Edward’s pants down.

…whyyyyy, Michael Sheen, whyyyyy.]

Whatever. Alice promises that Bella will end up a vampire, and shares her vision of them running through the forest in Hansel and Gretel costumes, and because Bella and Edward’s love is So True that they get to go home with the promise she will be turned shortly.

[Actual scene from the movie. They run in slow motion. Every single person in the theatre laughed.]

All the Cullens agree, and then everything will be fine forever, except that Jacob still loves her, and THIS ISN’T OVER, for some reason! PS, Edward asks Bella to marry him THE END.

(Literally. He asks the question, and it’s a smash-cut to oblivion.)

[Mmm, feminism.]

The good news is this: even some of the die-hard fans were cracking up by the end, because this movie is just so ridiculous that it goes past camp and really becomes some kind of horrible muddy mess you just have to make your way through as pale faces float up around you to taunt you and try to drag you into the suffocating dark like you’re Frodo or something.

The bad news is this: This movie is even worse than the first one. That movie was miles better than the book. I can only imagine how antifeminist this book must be. The movie is bad enough, since we spend the movie watching a young woman construct her identity ENTIRELY around the desire of men to possess and control her; if the one she likes isn’t available, she’s more than happy to give in to the next one who’s aggressive enough to follow her around, even if he is the kind of guy who will RIP UP YOUR FACE if you ever make him mad, and the young woman thinks this is a VIABLE RELATIONSHIP, OH MY GOD.

And this is not the story of one girl who constructs her identity this way, offering some insight or character development or gentle critique of this mindset; this capitulation to men is the rubric by which the other female characters are judged. All the female vampires have boyfriends or husbands (even Victoria, who seeks revenge for the death of her boyfriend); Bella feels kinship with Emily because Emily is in a relationship with a werewolf (which, at that millisecond in time, Bella wants also). By contrast, Jessica seems to have broken up with Mike, since Mike asks Bella out, and it’s Jessica and her discussion of zombie movies and Bella’s mental state that is supposed to be shallow and unappealing.

I hear repeatedly that it’s just a story; that people who read it know the difference between fantasy and reality, that this is just a fad. And it could be! Many of these teens could grow out of the idea of picking teams in a book about a girl, and never even having Team Bella as an option. Many of these older fans might just be enjoying the books for their camp value.

However, last year in the line, I did interviews, where I handed out a list of ten things and asked for which ones happened in the books. Seven or eight out of ten got circled. Then I pointed out that the list was ten warning signs that your partner is becoming abusive or controlling, and asked what they thought of Edward’s behavior in this new light.

Responses included, “I wish a guy loved me enough to treat me that way,” and, “But Bella needed it.”

This year I was behind a group of girls who briefly discussed Team Edward vs. Team Jacob. Each one pointed out that the other person’s champion was possessive and controlling/bossy. “Well, but she let him,” was the final word, on each side.

Sure, it’s just a story, but I worry. It’s hard to deny that if you show a message enough, to an audience wide enough, there’s some inevitable internalization. And the Twilight books normalize and lionize the total sublimation of a woman’s identity, which is just not a message the world needs, does it, STEPHENIE MEYER, OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

There’s a moment early in New Moon where Edward walks up to Bella in painfully-extended slow motion for their morning “No, I love you more”s. Proto-werewolf Jacob Black materializes to wish Bella a happy birthday. As Bella and Jacob talk, Edward stands a few feet away, glowering; when Bella hugs Jacob goodbye, Jacob makes a face at Edward over Bella’s utterly oblivious head, as music pounds behind them all.

This pretty much sets the tone for New Moon, a sequel to last year’s angsty steamroller, Twilight. Twilight was unevenly acted, awkwardly constructed, and so blue-tinted it might have been filmed through a bottle of Windex.

New Moon is worse.

Part of this disaster, admittedly, is not the fault of the filmmakers. The pushcart plot that teetered along carefully in the Twilight novel begins to wobble off the rails almost immediately in New Moon, as the series removes the pivotal Cullens from Forks, introduces a werewolf pack, retcons a powerful coven of vampires who live in Italy (come for the pasta, stay…for eternity, muahahaha!), and pulls two of Twilight’s feral vampires back into the mix.

Even with all Twilight’s flaws (and oh, they were legion), Catherine Hardwicke did manage to catch the kernel of the story—the teenage obsession with something better, more devoted than what life usually provides—and build a film that didn’t exceed its scope. In Hardwicke’s hands, the story was about a girl who falls in love with the Best High School Boy Ever, with some bad vampires handwaved into the last twenty minutes just to coast through a conflict on the way out.

New Moon’s kernel is the story of a girl whose entire life revolves around having a boy in it, and when the one she loves skips town, she takes up with the one she knows is waiting in the wings, until she can convince the other one to reappear. It’s a pretty tough sell, so I can understand where director Chris Weitz tried to up the Epic Storytelling ante in an attempt to give the movie some scope. However, if you’re going to do that, you should be good at it, and the last epic Weitz made was The Golden Compass. (Awkwaaaard.)

Weitz peppers the film with dream sequences that look like perfume-ad parodies; he blasts the soundtrack under dull shots to try to establish mood; he paints his leading man chalk-white only to the jaw, then gives him a ghostly apparition that looks like a Scooby-Doo villain; he creates werewolves whose close-ups are expressive but who move like the Heat Miser. (As if to distract from their wolf forms, he makes sure each pack member has a limitless supply of cutoff jeans – and no shirts. Werewolf packs don’t give a crap about your fast-food guidelines, okay, McDonald’s?)

Once, by accident, Weitz stumbles on a cinematic sequence, in which vampire baddie Victoria gets chased through the forest by the pack of werewolves. The scene has an otherworldly quality that suggests the true scope of this conflict. Luckily, that never goes anywhere, so we’re in no danger of sitting through a good film.

Weitz’s birthday-party-magician efforts to impress are palpable; however, it takes nothing away from the essential repulsiveness of the three characters at its center. Bella gets dumped by Edward (for her own safety, naturally), and spends thirty minutes grieving via night fits normally seen in three-year-olds. Edward’s spirit appears at random intervals to scold her like she actually is one. Jacob wants her to be his girlfriend—except it’s too dangerous—except she’d better not go back to Edward Cullen or else. Thank goodness her vampire BFF Alice shows up to bring Bella back to poor Edward before Bella has to stand up for herself!

Sadly, that’s not even an exaggeration; the underlying misogyny of the first movie has dropped all pretense, and is backpedaling to 1550 full speed ahead. Bella is a cipher, defined entirely by whichever male character is currently trying to dictate her behavior. And it doesn’t stop there! Of the two female characters introduced in the film, one is vampire Jane, a baby-faced Volturi enforcer, and the only character who calls its leader “Master.” The other is Emily, girlfriend of werewolf-pack leader Sam, who bears a faceful of scars from a time she made Sam angry and he turned into a werewolf and attacked her. The anecdote is told with sympathy—for Sam, whose guilt is presented as the tragedy of the incident. (I don’t know what to tell you; I just report the news.)

There are some bright spots in the form of supporting characters like snarky Jessica, disgusted with Bella, and goofy Mike, mocked at movie night when he can’t handle excessive violence and gore (like a real man should!). Meanwhile, Michael Sheen (an excellent actor who has a bad habit of saying yes to anyone who hands him a check) swans through his scenes as vampire leader Aro with the finger-licking delight of a Tim Curry University alumnus who’s confident no one will hold this film against him. Normally he would be wrong; however, when the three leads deliver performances so stilted they’d get you kicked out of a high school play, Sheen’s gleeful hamminess is a welcome relief.

New Moon, an uneasy balance between small-scale love story and chapter of a larger vampire/werewolf arc, handles neither well; the good news is, it ends up the funniest movie of the year. Weitz, you’ve succeeded at last!

[This post originally appeared at Tor.com]