There are a lot of things that this film does better tha the first Twilight film, and a lot that is worse. To start, I will say that the new romance in this film (Jacob) is way better written than the "main" romance (Edward). I'm not trying to pretend like I don't understand why teenage girls would love a brooding vampire played by Robert Pattinson, but it's pretty insane how much more chemistry is written into Bella and Jacob's conversations. It almost feels like a real romance film.

There are other aspects that are better as well. The color grader finally figured out how to turn down the blue channel, and the beautiful landscapes of the northwestern US are still quite stunning. And yeah, a lot of the smaller character moments are just objectively better. And Taylor looks so good.

The story and character writing is, generally, quite poor. There's still plenty of moments that just make me laugh hysterically. But there were also just a lot of interesting decisions. I'm not really sure if they were good or bad, but there were a few shots and a few scenes which were actually pretty unique. It made this film feel a lot more thoughful than the previous. Still bad though, in a kinda good way.

Also the wolf CGI is pretty shoddy, but not I'm not too surprised. Hope they figure that out before the rest of the big monster battles. But doesn't really bode well for the future.