In his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Mark Baulerine writes:
The Dumbest Generation cares little for history books, civic principles, foreign affairs, comparative religions, and serious media and art, and it knows less. Careening through their formative years, they don’t catch the knowledge bug, and tradition might as well be a foreign word.
This is a harsh and oversimplified critique of a generation, but I think it explains the Twilight obsession. These kids today know nothing of Stoker’s Dracula, Murnau’s Nosferatu, or Whedon’s Buffyverse. Perhaps that is why they don’t care how the Twilight saga robs and corrupts over a century of great art. And they seem to miss the fact completely that the character of Bella is completely dependent on men for happiness. She doesn’t exist except as the object of desire of random scumbag guys. (I mean, what kind of jerk is teaching a girl he likes to ride a motorcycle and doesn’t have her wear a helmet or at least ride alongside her?) Bella is one of the worst role models for young women that could possibly exist. Maybe if they made her a syphilitic prostitute running a Ponzi scheme it would be worse, but if Bella were a syphilitic prostitute running a Ponzi scheme, New Moon might have been an interesting movie.
As it stands, New Moon is an abomination. It is a 130-minute affirmation of the antiquated notion of a woman existing in entirely in relation to, and under the protection of, a man. Misogyny aside, New Moon is also a continuation of the Twilight’s saga watering down of plots and characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The basic premise of the saga — the new girl at school, who meets a sexy brooding vampire and is challenged by the difficulties of the human-vampire relationship — is straight out of Buffy. But it lacks the tragedy of the Buffy-Angel relationship, as Bella is not a Slayer, so she does not exist for the sole purpose of killing vampires. Bella is just a sad little girl with no self-confidence and no self-respect. Whereas Buffy is the strongest girl on the planet, Bella is one of the weakest. She has no redeeming qualities, nothing to admire, nothing to respect, making her an awful protagonist in an equally awful movie.
In addition to robbing and diluting one of the main plot points of Buffy, New Moon also borrows other aspects of the series: haunting dreams (Buffy dreams about being attacked by the Master), packs of kids who behave like animals (Oz as a werewolf, the kids from The Pack episode), and the crazy evil vampire chick who has a history with the sexy brooding vampire (Drusilla). There isn’t an original plot line in the entire movie.
To make matters worse, the actors of New Moon have no talent. Buffy wasn’t exactly a course in Shakespearean acting, but holy crap the New Moon actors are dreadful. I don’t know if the chick who plays Bella has a breathing disorder, but her acting style features a wide variety of unnatural pauses. The guy who played Edward, while admittedly a dashing young man, also has an incredibly blocky face. If someone tried to make an 8-bit video game version of a sexy vampire, the character sprites would look exactly like the dude who plays Edward. When the shirtless werewolf dude is the best actor in the movie, you know you’ve got a problem. (For Internets fun, Google Taylor Lautner alpaca (dude looks just like an alpaca))
In short, New Moon is a downright despicable movie. The “happy ending” is that Bella gets to become a vampire. Hooray! Selling your soul and your humanity to get closer to a sexy guy! What a great message for the young people. To think that there is a generation of girls who look up to this tripe–who see it as romantic, rather than a paean to dysfunctional and abusive relationships–makes me weep for humanity.
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