Catherine Hardwicke’s feeling for teen angst and female anxiety gave Twilight (the first film of the series based on Stephenie Meyer’s novels) immense potential. But Chris Weitz’s sequel New Moon is full of lost potential. Harwicke’s visual elegance via cinematographer Elliott Davis emphasized the wooded Northwest territory as a natural wonderland where the heroine Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) uneasy puberty emerged. Hardwicke gave Meyer’s fairy/gothic tale an idealized representation of universal adolescent tension. Bella’s attraction to teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) normalized today’s sexual permissiveness—the cultural pressure teens feel to be sexually active—with a concept both shrewd and authentically Bronte-esque.
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