TITLE: Stardust
DIRECTOR: Matthew Vaughn
NOVEL: Neil Gaiman
TAGLINE: "This summer a star falls. The chase begins."
CAST: Charlie Cox (Tristan), Claire Danes (Yvaine), Mark Strong (Septimus), Michelle Pfeiffer (Lamia), Robert de Niro (Captain Shakespeare), Nathaniel Parker (Dunstan Thorn)


A talking, walking star. A flamboyant, cross-dressing ship captain. A power-hungry heir-apparent to the throne. A captured princess. A witch who switches from hag to beauty to hag again. And a bumbling fool for a hero.



Stardust is definitely not your regular fairytale but it's no pastiche either. It's not like typical "adult" fairytales these days that almost always treat the genre in a uniformly parody-ish manner (shout out to Shrek).

Instead, it takes a very conventional plot ("In a countryside town bordering on a magical land, a young man makes a promise to his beloved that he'll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm"), places it in a very conventional setting (rural England), and then populates the story with a group of farcical, yet endearing characters.

Not all of the characters are unconventional, mind you. In fact, they all fall easily into their roles of villains and heroes but with enough idiosyncracies injected into their personalities to make them memorable.

My favorite has got to be Captain Shakespeare, played by Robert de Niro. I imagine Captain Shakespeare was very fun to write and it shows in how the character played out in the movie. Kudos to de Niro for being such a sport. Then again, he's no stranger to playing kooky characters. His role in Analyze That was something similar.

The other thing I like about the movie is its shock value. By "shock," I don't mean: "OMGWTFNOODLES! I'm shocked!" Something more tempered than that. For instance, the movie portrays the blue-blooded princes as literally blue-blooded, as in their blood is blue. I thought that was pretty shameless humor right there, which makes it all the more clever. :)

Production values are pretty high. It's not Lord of the Rings caliber. We don't see a lot of sweeping landscapes which means that most of the scenes were probably shot in a studio or computer-generated, which is fine by me.

The fight scenes are almost non-existent, that is if you discount the non-match between Prince Septimus and Lamia. There was a shining moment between Lamia and Tristan, but like all good things, it was too brief to actually go past the visuals. I say, this movie was never about fight scenes or anything physical like that. It's more of the mental variety and when it comes to wit, Stardust shines.

Labels: action, adaptation, adventure, comedy, fantasy, humor