I can't say the Twilight movies are without merit.  Each film has a scene or two that really works.  And each one is very slightly better than the one before.  But I'm also pretty sure that what I find interesting about the films differs greatly from what fifty million teenage girls like.

 

For example, my favorite character was, is, and ever shall be... Bella's Dad.  Billy Burke plays Charlie Swan very low key, very long-suffering-dad, and very funny.  And I think it is important for the story to have some regular (i.e. human) characters for Bella to play off of, since her school buddies are really pushed to the sidelines for this film.

 

Okay, so there is a plot and all.  Victoria (the red head from the first film whose boyfriend got torn apart by Edward because he wanted to eat Bella because... okay, that was never really made clear, but whatever) is back!  And she's so back that they hired a name actress (Bryce Dallas Howard, who is already vampire pale, so they saved some of the makeup budget right there) to play her.  Her plan is to create an army of newborn vampires to hunt down and kill the Cullen family, thus making it child's play to exact her revenge on Bella.  (It also isn't made startlingly clear why her vengeance is directed at Bella, and not Edward, the guy who actually killed her beau, but whatever.)  And this is a particularly clever plan, because Victoria's decisions are being watched by the psychic Alice, and since Alice isn't watching this newborn army, she can't see these decisions... though, somehow Alice doesn't see Victoria's decision to avoid making decisions.  (I find myself writing the word "whatever" a lot in this review, but whatever.)

 

But who cares about the plot!  There are hot guys!  (Okay, there's one hot guy, and one pasty faced Brit who couldn't even survive a single Harry Potter film.  Team Jacob!)  The love triange between Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson (I mean, Bella, Jacob and Edward, of course) is the real draw for the target demo.  So there's a lot of soulful glances from Edward, a lot of forehead-scrunching fretting from Bella, and a lot of shirtlessness from Jacob.

 

There's also a few time-killing forays into some of the secondary characters' pasts.  You know, if I want backstory about how my least favorite vampire (Rosalie) became a vampire, I'll read the book.  Snore.  But the battle sequences were pretty great, and they're getting steadily better at making convincing CG wolves.

 

One thing that "New Moon" did have over this one was it had a better ending.  That last minute proposal was a surprise.  This one had no surprise, which is a bad idea if you want to get people to want to see the finale.  Though, I have to admit, for most of the audience, that's really not going to be a problem, now is it?