fajrdrako | Stardust... (Reply)

I went to see the movie Stardust, based on the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. Enjoyed it very much - though I had quibbles.

What I loved about it:

Robert de Niro as Captain Shakespeare. He stole every scene he was in, and my heart, too. As far as I was concerned he was, or should have been, the hero of the story. (And I loved the wink at his last moment on screen.)

Michelle Pfeiffer as Lamia, the evil witch. I don't know what it was that made her performance so much fun - it was fairly stereotypical - but I got a kick out of her, scene after scene. Lamia had the best magic.

The scenery, the sets, the setting. A perfect fantasy landscape, cobbled out of bits of mountains in Wales and the Isle of Skye and Iceland. Maybe they aren't real places. Maybe they really are fantasies. And the wall itself was amazing, looking just the way it should, just the way Charles Vess' art shows us. (I am, if this hasn't come up lately, a huge fan of Charles Vess. He is the artist who drew the original graphic novel.) This carries over to the look of the old witch's caravan (inside and out), the interior of Lamia's palace, the fantasy forest, the fantasy towns.... Everything except maybe the palace in the last scene.

The voice of Ian McKellen as the narrator. Who gets excited over a narrator's voice? I did.

The seven dead (or about to be dead) sons of the old king. They were a collective hoot. Especially when dead. In fact, the death of Septimus was maybe my favourite scene in the whole movie. I enjoyed the death of Secundus, too. Why did Mark Strong, who played Septimus, look so familiar to me? I don't think I've actually ever seen him before, but kept thinking I had. But couldn't place him.

The costume design by Sammy Sheldon. I think this owes something to Charles Vess, too. I particularly liked the robes on Peter O'Toole as the old dying king. And the greatcoats on the various males were delightful fun.

The unspoken fact that Tristran's parents were together in the end. And the fact that his mother was a bluebird.

What I didn't love so much about it...

I thought the hero, Tristran, was an idiot. Intellectually challenged by the simplest tasks. This put the story right into the theme of 'boys adventure fantasy', where a young hero who doesn't have two clues to rub together goes on a quest and ends up winning the day after a brief lesson in sword-fighting. Not my favourite genre by any means. His innocent stupidity might have been fine if he was a ten-year-old hero, but he was supposed to be - what, eighteen? Charlie Cox, playing him, is 25.

Claire Danes was better as the star who has fallen to earth, Yvaine, but the character was still not particularly competent. She talked a good game, and I liked her, though she came perilously close to the 'shrill and complaining' school of heroines on various occasions, and as far as the story goes, she passively lurched from one kidnapping to the next. Couldn't she even try to defend herself, or escape, instead of waiting haplessly for the hero?

Then in the end it turned out that she can save the day with her powers, but only if she is in love and is loved in return. What lame kind of superpower is that? Isn't that a little chancy? What happens if she and Tristran have a fight?

The best thing about Yvaine was her hair. Long, fair, and smooth, I haven't seen hair that good since Legolas in The Lord of the Rings.

I spent a lot of the movie trying to figure out whether I really liked Claire Danes or not, and whether I thought she was beautiful. Never did come to a conclusion. She has charm - there's something most attractive and unusual about her. But personality? I'm not sure.

I didn't understand the prologue about the Victorian academics.

I thought Sienna Miller, who played the unlikeable Victoria - the girl we don't want the hero to win - was delightfully pretty and fun. I'm not sure this was a good thing or a bad thing, since it made me want to see (and maybe even cheer for) a character we were supposed to hate.

The movie was a bit longer than it might have been - scenes could have been tightened up. Long scenes could have been snappier. I got a bit impatient in some of them.

Some scenes were annoyingly predictable - such as the scene where Yvaine thinks Tristran (after making love to her) has inexplicably abandoned her for Victoria.