By BrendaL-21, 18 January 2010

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On its opening night, New Moon broke records by taking in a spectacular $72.7 million, making it the biggest opening day in box office history and kicking The Dark Knight into second place.

The Twilight saga's newest movie installment, New Moon, boasted a bigger cast (enter Dakota Fanning), a bigger story (cue Volturi sequence shot in Italy), and - most importantly - a bigger budget.

And yet, I walked away from the theatre feeling kind of...meh.

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Of course, it's not like I'd been expecting the movie to be good. After all, we all know that the Twilight movies aren't and never will be Oscar-winning stuff (considering the source material). Watching a Twilight film will always be a total cheese-fest, and I certainly don't try to delude myself into pretending otherwise.

However, one would hope that - in the sea of all this cheese - there would be at least one redeeming element to the film. (And there is. But I'll get to that at the very end). Single redeeming factor aside, the movie was pretty craptastic.

My biggest complaint about New Moon is that it did not deliver emotionally. The story is supposed to be about Bella's difficult separation from Edward and the consolation she receives from spending time with Jacob. Emotional fodder, indeed. And yet, I couldn't bring myself to feel anything of the supposedly epic romance between Bella and Edward.

On screen, the cheesily overdramatic dialogue was there, the dreamy looks were there, and the tears were there, but nothing that I saw in the course of the 130-minute-long film elicited the remotest flutter of feeling in me. As movie reviewer, Jeff Bayer, so brilliantly put it: "So we've got a paper cut and a phone call, and a romance that never feels as big as the movie tries to make it seem".

Not all was lost, however. The bigger budget did make for some welcome improvements from the first film - such as improved special effects and some nice action sequences. The new coloured contacts were pretty neat, too. (Though, I have the vague suspicion that the makeup directors were too distracted by the golden glory of the contacts to realize that Rob Pattinson had sprouted caterpillars above his eyes. Or, you know, perhaps they were just too busy to address the whole eyebrow issue because they were consumed with the task of perfecting his painted-on abs).

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But perhaps I've been a bit harsh on the film. After all, New Moon never set itself out to be much more than an film adaptation of a story written very-much for teenage girls. (And for gosh sakes it's about vampires and werewolves!)

So, my parting words for those of you who have not yet popped round your nearest theatre to catch New Moon are as follows: if you passively let the whole experience wash over you, like I did, then it can be still be a pretty enjoyable experience.

And the best thing about New Moon? That single redeeming factor that I mentioned earlier?

I have two words for you: Taylor. Lautner.