So, I forget exactly why it was I decided in the end to watch the first Twilight, but I know I would never have watched the sequel (and the next one) were it not for the unfortunate casting of Dakota Fanning (and, in the next one, Jodelle Ferland)… I may have actually physically kicked something when I first realised I would “have to” watch this. So, yeah, I didn’t exactly come to it with an open heart LOL.

There’s a scene here that to me is pretty much the whole Twilight “Saga” (please, do we really have to call it that?) in a nutshell. Even better than the fact that the first major plot point hinges on ZOMG a papercut! there is a montage following Edward’s departure that literally made me LOL. Kristen Stewart sits in a chair in the middle of a room, and the camera begins to spin around her slowly. Titles indicate the passage of months as an emo song plays and she sits there looking miserable the whole time. I might be wrong, please tell me if I am, but I think we’re actually supposed to feel something other than “PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!” about this. (I’ve since been told that this sequence appears in the novel as simply blank pages with the month names typed in the middle, which only makes it funnier…)

Later, the kids go to see a movie within the movie – titles overheard in this fictional movie theatre? “Love Spelled Backwards Is Love” and “Punch Face”. No kidding. “Drake and Josh” had better made up titles than this. DRAKE AND JOSH.

Okay, I was mostly just annoyed that I watched this for Dakota Fanning and it takes her over an hour to show up. Really: if you’re planning to watch the movie for the same reason, don’t bother. Her role is nothing here, though it looks like she might have more to do in the third (alas). And it’s far from even her most averagely half-good work. I have no clue why she thought these movies were a good idea. I don’t think I wanna know.

But there was something else that irked me… the fact that after being so annoyed by how long it took Kristen Stewart’s character in the first movie to say “you’re a vampire…”, she basically does the EXACT same thing with Jacob the werewolf this time around. At one point he actually says to her, “the killer part is you already KNOW…” like as if he might as well be asking, “Were you dropped on your head as a child?” When the penny finally drops, someone actually says, “I guess the wolf is out of the bag…” If this were a comedy it might be perfect. “So you’re a werewolf…” Bella finally twigs, “Last time I checked,” quips Jacob… “… Can’t you just, like, stop?” she asks.

But for all my bitching, I’ve gotta say, there’s a point where it slightly flips and bizarrely isn’t in the end quite as bad as Twilight. “It’s a wolf thing,” Jacob tells Bella at one point. “No, it’s a Jacob thing,” she says, “You’re like your own sun,” and I kinda got the tingles a little. But then comes the clincher, when Bella faces both her potential loves and tells them,

“Stop. You can’t hurt each other without hurting me…”

And I kinda got it. When you boil down the triangle in this series to its simplest components like that, just about everyone has a personal experience they can bring to it, and for me this line really stung. Sure, there’s still at least one more embarrassing “Twilight in a nutshell” moment to be had at this later, better stage in the movie (Michael Sheen as a mindreading vampire looks into Bella’s thoughts and sees “nothing”, LOL), but as the credits rolled I can’t deny I found myself just a little choked up, and even if that had nothing to do with the movie as a whole, it still for me makes this installment that much better than the first. But there’s still way better things to get so excited about, kids.