Ever since Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the sparkling vampire with a pure heart of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, first made his appearance on the big screen a year ago, women of all ages have been awaiting his return. In the past year, hunger for the "eternal romance" between Edward and his beloved, non-vampire Bella (Kristen Stewart) has fueled tabloid headline after tabloid headline about the supposed real-life romance between the film's two leads. However, as Pattinson and Stewart have continued to shoot down nearly every rumor of their romance and clips showing Edward's departure and Bella's despair without him have begun to appear, the question has become: Could the romance so many of us fell in love with last year really be too good to be true? And this Friday, with the release of The Twilight Saga's New Moon, we finally get our answer.

While the main cast of New Moon remains the same as that of Twilight—along with Bella's bedroom dècor and the Cullens' pasty-white complexions—New Moon hits theaters this Friday after not only a year since its last installment but significant change in the in-between. The film's credits alone give off a sense of "artistic upgrade," with additions and substitutions to the cast and crew including director Chris Weitz (who took over for Catherine Hardwicke), actors Dakota Fanning and Michael Sheen (who joined the cast as members of the Volturi), and the hiring of both a European cinematographer and composer over the two Americans who held the same positions in the first film. Just watching a few scenes, you can see the influx of Hollywood money in everything from the cinematography to the lighting, the locations, and the score.

But even as the look and feel of the series has gone from more earthy and raw to more dazzling and stylized, the story has almost gone the opposite way. While the first film was about the romance of falling in love, the second one is about the reality of the trials and questions that will challenge even the greatest love out there. And while the same romance that so many fell for in the first is still there, with it also comes the possibility that maybe it's not meant to be.

Opening with a dream in which Bella sees herself as an old woman in relation to Edward's perpetually younger man, New Moon picks up where Twilight left off, once again framing itself within the context of eternity. As Bella continues her plea to be made immortal like Edward, she presents us with the idea that there is a love out there so fulfilling that it would make us want to live forever. On the other side, we are given both Edward and Bella's despair when presented with either a limited lifetime or an eternity robbed of that love. But while the solution to happily-ever-after seems simple enough, such a happily-ever isn't quite that easy. And so begins a story about the struggle to actually embrace a love so valuable that it alone makes you want to live both right now and forever.

While the "it's not you, it's me" argument is one we so often scoff at and immediately label as false, that is essentially what New Moon is about. We know that Edward loves Bella. We know that Bella loves Edward. And, to mix things up a bit, we quickly learn that Jacob (Taylor Lautner) also loves Bella. The problem—which we first see when Edward decides to leave Bella after her life is threatened by a member of his family and which is expanded when Jacob discovers that he's not exactly a normal teenaged boy either—is that both young men see their ability to love Bella as flawed. While each young man may desire to protect and love Bella, the fear that they will do more harm to her than good drives Edward away within the film's first half hour and has Taylor suddenly avoiding Bella at all costs after he has just spent most of the film pursuing her affection. As Jacob tells Bella when she confronts him about his sudden distancing of himself from her, "I promised I wouldn't hurt you. This is me keeping my promise."

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