Yes, I got out there for the New Moon midnight premiere and yes, it was a 12-17 year-old-girl madhouse. It would take forever and also probably be impossible to recall all the details in a chronological order so I'm going to hit the key points that stick out in my mind, in addition to a lot of commentary and comparison to the novel. I would recommend this review to anyone who has read the book and is trying to decide whether to see the movie, OR, has seen the movie but is trying to decide whether to read the book(s). If you want to stop right here I'll just say that if I were ranking the movie out of 10 with regard to book-to-movie porting, I'd give it a 9. If I were ranking it in terms of how good a movie it was period, I'd say 9.5.
Please Consider All Following Information Spoilerific for New Moon the book AND the movie!
Starting out, I cannot begin to describe how jazzed I was when first reading New Moon to discover that Stephanie Meyer decided to quote the lines from Romeo & Juliet that go something like:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder.
Which, as they kiss, consume.
It was always one of my favorites, and is from the scene in R&J when the friar is marrying them. As you can kind of discern, it basically warns against consuming passion, lust, and the kind of love that Shakespeare loved to write about so much -- devotion. A great deal of A Midsummer Night's Dream is spent on the topic of devotion, in that case, it was the kind imbued by magic spells. Later, in R&J, he dabbled in the idea of a naturally occurring devotion that was, in the end, self-destructive. I think the fascinating parallels between R&J and Twilight are that, if you read the series, S. Meyer clearly thinks her tale superior to R&J, though I have no doubt that unless she's career suicidal, she'd never admit it. If you read between the lines of a few veiled references and comments, particularly, one from Edward in which he criticizes Romeo for being so fickle; plus another by Bella asking herself what would have happened if Paris hadn't been such a bad guy and if Juliet had actually liked him as a friend, if he'd been a great guy (like Jacob). In the New Moon chapter "Paris", Jacob is clearly styled after Paris from R&J, only he's portrayed as much harder to dislike, and thus harder to dismiss. Meyer-through-Bella practically comes out and says that it would be a much more compelling romantic quandary if Paris were a nice enough guy and if the wedding hadn't forced Juliet's hand. The last thing I will say about the parallel to Romeo & Juliet is that, many a movie critic and viewer have complained that throughout the first two films, it's hard to see any of the 3 loving each other because they are so "joyless". S. Meyer's portrayal of devotional love is definitely one bordering on macabre... there is almost no time when Bella seems actually *happy* to be with Edward, she just seems like she can't stand to be any other way. I think this pace follows very much with the fantasy romance vehicle and is probably why a lot of people more entertained by realistic love stories would cheer for Team Jacob and/or fail to see the appeal in the entire franchise. That said, I don't think being Team Jacob makes a lot of sense since he has very obviously been the romantic foil from the beginning.... he's the boy she "should love", which in most fantasy romances (not to mention teen romances), automatically makes him the boy she won't love. That said, I have a few reasons for finding this beautifully asymmetric arrangement pleasing.
To get back to the movie, I knew how a lot of it would unfold from reading the book, and as a fan I was continually grabbed by the fun interactions between the characters in the beginning. New Moon is basically broken up into 5 main parts:
1. Before the Birthday
2. The Birthday
3. Post Birthday
4. Jacob
5. Alice & Italy
1. Before the birthday - showing us what "a day in the life of a love-struck, star-crossed highschool dream couple" is like. Just average daily things going on, as well as setting the stage for Bella's increasing anxiety about getting older.
2. The Birthday - significant rising action to the film in which the first conflict is introduced.
3. Post Birthday - Bella's in despair, depressed, and basically acting like a zombie. I liked and respected how realistic and disturbing they portrayed her night terrors. The one thing that bothered me was that way later, the novel presented a picture of just how bad it really was when Alice shows up and Bella wakes up to overhear her dad telling Alice about it... this is not in the movie. We hear about how right after Edward left, Bella basically went catatonic. Was like a stone for a week when he started to pack up her things and her mother came, at which point she went ballistic, screaming about not being able to leave Forks. That's when she "woke up" to the real world, but didn't really get any better. "Sleep-walked through senior year" is the phrase they use in every schpiel. I read somewhere the director, Chris Weitz, say that he's never worked with an actress as "serious" as Kristen Stewart, and that she was dedicated to really showing Bella's depression. I think this panned out, because it's very well done, IMO. Similarly to how Twilight's romantic pace seemed too fast to some, viewers may think Bella's depression is over-the-top, but I think this is because the nature of film compresses how much time can really be spent showing someone depressed. The rotating camera shot that says "October, November, December" is an excellent transference of the way it was done in the book. Basically after she falls asleep in a psychotic fervor, after Sam finds her, the book just has 3 blank pages with the block letters on them "October, November, December" to demonstrate that basically nothing of any consequence happened to her because she was just dead to the world. This period ends when she gets the bikes and takes them to Jacob's.
4. Jacob - this is when Bella begins to improve, but it's slow going. This section probably has the most deviations between the book and the movie. Primarily, it's inciting circumstances and motives that are changed. We are lead to believe that Bella gets the idea to ride a motorcycle for the thrill of seeing Edward's face by going up to some random guy in front of a bar and getting a ride on his bike. This is only partially true - she gets the 'danger thrill' idea from approaching strange men, because it reminds her of almost being mugged in Port Angeles (which was actually much more terrifying in the book Twilight than in the movie Twilight. In the book it looked like she might actually get like raped and killed, and the scene was longer), but she doesn't ride his bike. The bike idea comes to her randomly as she is driving down the street and sees some bikes out on someone's front lawn to be picked up for trash. She learns that these belong to... I think Seth and Leah... And it is possible that the movie wanted to put off having to introduce the Seth/Leah family until Eclipse, since so much else was going on with the werewolf side of things as it is. Everything from when she takes the bikes to Jacob until Alice returns is pretty spot-on. The only thing left out is exactly how Bella finds "The Meadow" again (The Meadow is an EXTREMELY important symbol throughout S. Meyer's series), where she first saw Edward's skin. She finds it in the book when she and Jacob finish working on the bikes and go riding several times but have to find something new to do. She says she found this great place in the woods and wants to find it again, so they go on several land nav sessions where he walks her through the woods but they never find it. Later, when he's sequestered on the reservation because he's transforming and she can't get ahold of him to save her life, she goes on her own and, wouldn't you know it, finds the Meadow just on a whim. That's when Laurent shows up. In the movie,the circumstances surrounding WHY she went out by herself are somewhat mysterious. In the book at least it was part of a process by which she was looking for the meadow with Jacob but couldn't find it. Naturally, she didn't tell him why it was important... and naturally he didn't care, he just wanted to spend more time with her.
5. Alice & Italy - when Alice shows up, the plot twists significantly. I could as easily call this section "Bella jumps off a cliff". After seeing Sam, Quil and Embry cliff diving, she realizes this would be a GREAT way to have an adrenaline rush. This scene is very well done, the jump itself, because it shows how I envisioned her. She dives, she sees him, she has a rush, she hits the water and comes back up, she's fine, she thinks "wow that was great I'm going to do it again!" and then is hit by the surf. Then again, and again. I heard girls in the theater actually gasping and crying. Like "oh my god, Bella might really die! AN HOUR INTO THE 2ND MOVIE!!!" Well, it was a pretty brutal near-drowning. Jacob swoops in and saves her, of course, his golden brown russet skin gleaming with icy water droplets, which, naturally, practically steam off his 108 degree body. I found myself wondering if it was intentional that S. Meyer aged Edward (108) the same as Jacob's body temperature (108) or if it was coincidence.
Of course, when Alice shows up, everything changes. We find out she can't see werewolves in her visions. Why? Because they are so impulsive and their "phasing" is so unpredictable that their futures are completely unknown. This reinforces that even the author is of the opinion that Jacob is a very unstable force in the book, at least after he changes. The parts relating to the changes Jacob goes through when he changes, as a person, not physically, are left a little wanting. There is significant time and attention paid in the book to the fact that he basically is a different person after he changes. His physicality should present a practical token of this transformation... he's NOT the same kid anymore and, very much like Edward or any other vampire does in their first few months/years of existence, spends the next 2 books trying to reclaim part of his humanity and to make his own path. This storyline is an interesting one, but is not really entertained or explored in this movie. I'm hoping there are a few more scenes dealing with this in the extended cut DVD.
I wouldn't call it a sixth part, but basically after Alice shows up, the ongoing Volturi storyline that will dominate the 3rd and 4th books is kicked off. This is a very important part of the movie, and probably could have stood to gain 15 to 20 minutes more screen time on details about the Volturi. We really only got any meaningful dialog from Aro, and it wasn't quite as I pictured it in the book. The Volturi hall was much more regal and fancy, less dungeon-like than I pictured in the book. The events from the point that Bella and Alice leave Forks to the point they get to the Volterra St. Marcus parade encompass only about 5 minutes in the movie, max, but probably 100 pages in the book. It's very sped up, which is understandable, because the primary action is "going to Italy". The details in the book about what she was thinking while they drove to the airport, or about how they changed planes in Houston, or in NYC, or about how agonizing it was to wait on the plane, or about how her and Alice talked more about changing her -- just weren't worthy of screen time. Jumping to the pair screaming down an Italian country road in a Porsche was a great segue, though, and I was actually relieved that some of the humdrum of getting INTO VOLTERRA that was seen in the book was weeded out. This whole scene was replicated nearly identically.
My one complaint about it is once she gets to him, in the book he doesn't believe she's really alive. The clock tower had just chimed and he had just taken a miniscule step into the sunlight when she collides with him and he looks up, thinking he'd been killed by the Volturi already. "Wow, they're quick", he says to himself. He looks down and sees Bella and thinks "Wow, Carlisle was right", thinking both he, and Bella, are dead, and the Carlisle was right about their little disagreement regarding whether they (vampires) have a soul, or are really doomed to eternal damnation. In the movie, once she said "Open your eyes" and he sees her, there is immediate understanding that she is alive. I preferred the book's version.
One of my overall favorite moments was between Bella and Jasper when he uses his mood-altering ability to get her to agree to Alice's proposal for a birthday party. Incidentally, the inquisitive viewer-but-not-reader may struggle with understanding why Jasper's ability works on Bella but not Edward's or (as we find out later, Aro's or Jane's). This is a little complicated but is explained in the book, and is related to the exact nature of Edward/Aro/Janes' abilities versus Jasper's, which is slightly different.
I have one main complaint that goes throughout the film and is just makeup-related. One of the aspects of Twilight that allowed me to become really engaged in it and to identify and care about these vampire characters, which in many other franchises are otherwise unreachable and, which the viewer is unsympathetic towards -- was the fact that they all looked more or less human, other than being extraordinarily attractive. This changed in the second film, and I'm not sure what the reasoning was. The eye color was much more pronounced to the point that in principal photography and early trailers, I thought they changed actors in some cases before looking it up. Laurent, Alice, Carlisle, Jasper, and Rosalie for the most part, look significantly different. It is, perhaps, just a result of the fact that they are now going to exaggerate the pretty eye color because it took off so well with fans... but it's distracting, and it's also a problem for believability. Could these people really walk around with these brilliantly yellow and orange and golden honey brown eyes and not attract the wrong kind of attention? Edward's eyes in the 2nd act of Twilight were just the perfect tone of brown to stand out and be a noticeable departure from the black (indicating no longer hungry, but sated)... but they took it slightly overboard in New Moon and I hope they back off it a little in Eclipse.
The film was much more true to the book than the first one. Notable deviations I can think of... the motorcycles... the scenes where the wolves chase Victoria (we were never shown that they actually came face to face with her, yet Jacob does (wolf form)... there is no physical confrontation between Edward and the Volturi in the book but he fights Dimitri in the movie... but everything else about this scene is accurately reproduced.
It felt a little like the movie ran out of time when she got home, everything was fine, and she never had to explain a single thing to Charlie. She actually had a VERY unpleasant, very serious lie-story she had to tell him to calm him down.
I also enjoyed that they accurately put together the "vote" chapter, from the very end of New Moon. That scene went down pretty much exactly as I pictured it with the exception that in the book I think they were all sitting at a table, but that doesn't matter any. I thought they might cut out/down Rosalie's response, which I didn't want them to do, because it has particular significance regarding the developing relationship and rapport between her and Bella later in Breaking Dawn... which will be important then.
All in all, I thought they did a great job with this one. I probably have a lot more to say but I'm exhausted and coherency has left me, so I'll add whatever thoughts occur to me as you all comment
What did YOU think of New Moon?
The problem is, I'm a person who gets "soured" on something and then it gets all "tainted" and I can't like any of it. So I enjoyed the books, and I think if I watch the movie and get irritated with it, my several reservations about the whole story (ie, why do they SPARKLE!!!!!) would overflow into my conscious mind and I would get irritated (more so) with the whole franchise. So I just stick to the books. 
