As she stumbles, panting, through thick underbrush at the beginning of “New Moon,” Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) comes face to face with that which she fears most. No, she doesn’t encounter a villainous monster (series author Stephenie Meyer has defanged or declawed most of these); instead, she sees herself grow old. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson)―her pale, sharp-browed Adonis―also appears in the clearing, striding toward her senescent self. This nightmare, one of many Bella has during the film, exposes, as a central theme: her fear of aging, which she perceives as her romantic obsolescence. Will their awkward, mumbling love stand the test of time; or will Edward, when met with (as Yeats put it) “the sorrows of [her] changing face,” turn and fly? “New Moon,” an overlong mess of hormones and heartache, is not sure.

This dream serves as a presage for what awaits her in the morning: her eighteenth birthday. After witnessing her forage for gray hairs and rattle off a few self-deprecating remarks in the school parking lot, it’s clear that age, or more accurately the advancement of it, weighs heavily on her mind. Now a year older than Edward looks, she struggles to avoid being reminded of it; she coyly utters “I thought we said no presents” no less than four times in the first 15 minutes. (Methinks the lady doth protest too much.) While she is unhappy with its occasion, Bella is no doubt pleased with the attention she receives. She accepts the presents she was not expecting, and from Edward, the only person who obeyed her wishes, she demands one: a kiss. This small contradiction points to the dangerous reasoning behind her mortal fear; namely, that without her youth and beauty she would lose the attention she craves from Edward, thus surrendering a large part of how she defines herself.

And I can’t say I disagree with her. Their love can’t be based on much else at this point, as all that we’ve seen onscreen so far is a series of spoken devotions, pronouncements of love rather than the presence of it. Bella, though 18, is far from anything resembling an adult. She is not able (nor is the audience, it seems) to differentiate between her mawkish exchanges with Edward and what she will one day, hopefully, come to understand as love. She sacrifices the actual for the imagined (an action Meyer silently and irresponsibly condones), replacing any substantial form of love―the immediacy and small moments required to connect with someone in a meaningful way―with an abstraction they jejunely refer to as “forever.”

After a scuffle with Jasper, the perpetually constipated member of the Cullen family, Edward begins to doubt his ability to protect Bella. Though she is eager to file the incident under ‘bloodthirsty misunderstanding,’ Edward’s not taking any chances. He tells her that he’s leaving, and that they will never see each other again; what’s more, he adds a few lines of feigned scorn―go on, get!―to their break-up which, inexplicably, takes place deep in the woods.

Months pass, cameras spin, and still Bella seems no closer to dealing with the break-up in a healthy way. She wakes up screaming and pounding her chest so often that her father suggests she move back to her mother’s and start therapy. But Bella soon finds two ways to dull the heartbreak, at least enough to keep her father from noticing. The first, and by far the most disturbing way, is by putting herself in situations of increasing danger―crashing motorcycles, cliff-diving, almost being date-raped by a biker―in order to summon up an incorporeal version of Edward that, like a semaphore, seeks to flag her in the right direction. What she calls being an “adrenaline junkie,” the process of inflicting pain upon herself or placing herself in close proximity with danger, is practically a stand-in for cutting. If you hurt yourself, the film suggests, he’ll HAVE to notice you.

Her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), the second and less physically compromising distraction, is also growing up. His affection for her, which has been apparent since the first film, is channeled into a pair of motorcycles she saves from the junk-yard with her disposable income. They fill up their afternoon hours with this project, giggling through grease and bad puns. And though Jacob now sports an impressive set of abs, the gratuitous exposure of which left theatres nationwide in a damp frenzy, Bella keeps him at arm’s length. Her feelings for Edward wrestle down her budding feelings for Jacob, and triumph for the better part of the film. She, however unintentionally, keeps him interested, satisfying her emotional need for companionship while denying him his. Keeping his advances at bay with a combination of darting downward glances and lip biting, she reasserts her wish to preserve the friendship as is, regardless of her own mixed feelings. Even her speech patterns mirror her indecision; Jacob is “sorta beautiful,” his birthday gift is “kinda perfect.” These equivocations are less a result of fumbling teenage ineloquence as they are of deep romantic confusion.

Plodding onward from here, “New Moon” contrives minor dangers for Bella to encounter, from revenge-driven vampires to hot-tempered werewolves, all of which barely elicit a batted eyelash from the unintentionally stoic Ms. Stewart. After her cliff-jumping escapades, she makes for Italy―Virgin Air―to save lovesick Edward from provoking the wrath of the Volturi, an order of anachronistically dressed vampire royalty.

If this all seems a bit rushed, that’s because it is. Director Chris Weitz doesn’t know quite what to do with the material he’s given, nor does he know where to place narrative importance. The result is a nearly shapeless film, made solely to wend the way for the rest of the series, establishing a rival for Bella’s affections and complicating the notion of love eternal which has, until this point, been a cinematic fait accompli. The film’s best moments come not from any of the romantic leads, but from Aros (played by the ceaselessly dependable Michael Sheen), the de facto leader of the Volturi who, flanked by two decrepit fops, interrogates Bella with unblinking eyes and a crooked smile. When she leaves, she passes by a group of tourists being led in, like calves to slaughter, to the Volturi’s chamber. For Bella and for us, their cries, echoing through the hallway, are a crude intrusion of the actual―the first sign of genuine danger in a series that has, till now, presented only the absence of it.