Movie Review: Stardust
So I went to check out Stardust on friday - Neil Gaiman fanboy that I am. Been looking forward to the movie for awhile but the trailers were really uninteresting and made me worry for the movie. Fortunately, the worries weren’t founded. The executive summary is that I give this movie a 9 (barely, though - it was an 8.5 just after the movie and moved up to a 9 after the fact) on the felix scale of 0-10. It was quite good - but you need to leave your thoughts of the book at home. It’s incredibly streamlined to fit into the 2 hour time frame - whole elements are missing and bits of the story are changed and rearranged. These are things any good movie adaptation needs to do - slavishly following the book gives you a movie with a greatest hits assortment of scenes from the original source material that holds together very thinly.
Click more to read on - some spoiling will probably occur…
Ok, so.. the movie was good. Maria, who had very strong doubts about it probably liked it even more than I did. I made the mistake of re-reading the book about a month ago so it was pretty fresh in my mind and there were scenes I was looking forward to seeing that weren’t in the movie. That’s always the problem with movie adaptations - it took me awhile to let go of my expectations and watch the movie simply as an original thing.
I think it did a good job of keeping with the spirit of the movie. I initially didn’t love Charlie Cox (who played Tristran) but he grew on me and I definitely liked him quite a bit by the end. Everyone else I thought was quite good, even Michelle Pfeiffer who I generally don’t love. And you gotta love Billy (the goat). Septimus was good - his final scene (the zombie’ish scene) was great! I did want him to be more deliciously evil, though.
The movie was incredibly streamlined - many secondary characters become 2 dimensional ciphers because no time could be spent on developing that line. Victoria is a great example where she is an interesting and not bad person in the books, just a woman who isn’t interested in Tristran - in the movie she’s just a gold digger looking to marry someone with good looks and money.
The movie starts out very strangely with some telescope and scientists in London, which was annoying and didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie. Given such a huge backstory, they took the easy way out and went with a voice over narrator, which is in keeping with the book, but I didn’t love it. The entire part of the book telling of Dunstan Thorn’s adventures and setting up the story was condensed into about 10 minutes or so. Which I can understand. But you know, when I look at the beginning of Serenity which gives you the backstory, the motivation and most of the characters in an incredibly engaging way (without no voice over explaining everything to you), I simply now expect more from movies. But I guess everyone can’t be Joss Whedon. Sigh.
I was also initially put off by the decision to make the 7 princes of Stormhold comedic, but I got over that and began liking it for the most part. Same with DeNiro’s character. I think, it was kind of a cheap laugh - but it was pretty funny and when I wasn’t thinking too much about it I liked it a lot (when I stepped back a bit and thought about it, I didn’t think he did all that great a job of it).
All in all, it’s worth seeing. Don’t let the trailers dissuade you from seeing it - they lie. I think the problem with the movie is that it’s hard to capture in a trailer, it’s hard to explain what it is. But what it is is good. And for a budget of only $65 million, they did a darn fine job. The theater I saw was pretty full but definitely not sold out - which makes me worry for the movie - opening night as it was. Hopefully people like it and the word of mouth is good. Anecdotally as I was leaving the theater and the theater attendants were coming in, one of them asked a movie goer, “That was Stardust, right?”, to which they received an affirmations. “I thought that it was going to be trash, but it was really good!” And when the movie goer said it was based on a book, he seemed genuinely interested. So, based on that one review from someone who knew nothing at all of the movie or it’s origins, I’m going to be optimistic about the word of mouth.
PS What pisses me off is that a movie like this is confined to 2 hours, when there’s many more hours of storytelling to give. Wonderful details and sub-plots and all manner of things are cut out to make the movie fit into the alotted time. Meanwhile, crap movies like King Kong get to be 3 hours when there’s barely an hour and a half of actual story to tell. Here’s to hoping that there’s an extended edition DVD of Stardust!
