New Moon **1/2

New Moon begins where Twilight left off, with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) starting another year at her Forks, Washington high school replete with its share of fair-skinned, emotional and all-around depressing beauties, and oh yeah, vampires. The film opens with Bella dreaming the night before her eighteenth birthday of herself at a much older age with her immortal beau and ever-youthful Edward (Robert Pattinson). Her birthday is a reminder of her age, a concern she voices to Edward, who reminds her he’s 109. That’s the classic problem of a mortal-immortal couple, dammit. One’s much older, but looks much younger. The other will just grow old and die. Unless…?

Anyway, the plot of New Moon really starts when Edward leaves. He says that his family must relocate because they’ve been there a bit too long without aging and people are starting to notice. “I don’t want you to come,” he tells Bella, as if we believe him. He’s trying to protect her from his family, one of which attacked her when she cut herself unwrapping her birthday present (a symbol of her life and aging!). The Cullens are a nice family of vampires, but they’re still vampires, and you never know what could happen.

Bella falls into a state of depression for months after Edward leaves, doing little more than sitting in her room and going to school. This portion of the film is actually an astute look at the pseudo-depression that inflicts so many high school kids. It’s real because it feels real, and the film does a fine job of relating Bella’s state of mind. She shuns her friends until finally she reaches out to Jacob (Taylor Lautner), a Native American who lives on the reservation near Forks. They begin to fix up motorcycles together, and it’s obvious that while Bella likes Jacob, he likes her a bit more. Another common high school problem.

From there, the film plays out in your typical not-so Romeo & Juliet sort of way, bringing the supernatural back to the forefront of the story. The scenes with the Volturi (aka vampire royalty) are entertaining, with Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning portraying some powerfully scary vamps. All together, New Moon is a sold achievement. It’s an improvement over Chris Weitz’s last film from a popular book series, The Golden Compass, and with a bigger budget than the first Twilight movie he was able to achieve a bit more visually. Of the three lead actors, Lautner’s performance is the weakest, but it seems to matter little to the tweens in the audience who hoot and holler for his killer abs and biceps. On its surface, New Moon is PG porn for pre-teen girls and their moms. But it’s also a relatively well crafted special effects film.