Not being a teenage girl, I’m not a typical fan of the Twilight franchise. In fact I’m not a fan at all. I didn’t read the books and I found the first movie a chore to sit through. But I mostly liked the sequel, and I urge others like me to give it a chance.

In the previous film we saw 17-year-old Bella Swan (Stewart) fall in love with fashionably emo schoolmate Edward Cullen (Pattinson), who turned out to have been a vampire for the past century or so. Now, some months on, Edward has doubts about whether it’s fair to dally with a mortal schoolgirl, breaks off the relationship, and vanishes. As a result, Bella falls in with a group of werewolves (vampires’ natural enemies, it transpires). But anyone who spotted the heavily underlined “Romeo and Juliet” parallels drawn early in the film will realise that the story of Edward and Bella has yet to play out.

I loved the windswept romantic vistas of this film and although I frequently wanted the main characters to just get over it, I was moved by their plight. I’ll admit the film sometimes makes itself ridiculous by straining for effects it cannot pull off, but I have a hunch that the much-maligned young female fans of the Twilight series are as alive to the film’s failings as anyone else. They just don’t see this as a reason not to get involved in the story. I’m with them.