Why didn’t Stardust work?
Seriously, why didn’t this movie work?
Look at the pedigree for this one. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, the same director who gave us X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass and various Kingsman movies was behind the camera for this one. The story was based off a novel by Neil Gaiman. Those two names behind the scenes should mean something, right?
And then there’s the cast. Starting with Ian McKellen acting as an unseen narrator, we have big name actors like Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Peter O’Toole along for the ride, though O’Toole only appears in a single scene. Then there’s Claire Danes as the female lead. Vaughn regulars Mark Strong and Jason Flemyng are there. We’ve got small parts to actors who became better known later like Daredevil‘s Charlie Cox as the male lead, Mark Williams from the Harry Potter series as a goat transformed into a man, and Rupert Everett as a doomed prince. Then there’s Ricky Gervais as a fence and a small role to future Jigsaw for the Netflix Punisher series Ben Barnes as the younger version of Cox’s father. Plus, Sienna Miller marries rich dolt Henry Cavill. That’s a lot of familiar names and faces.
And yet, somehow, this movie still doesn’t really work.
My best guess is that Vaughn and Gaiman’s respective styles don’t really match well. Gaiman, as a writer, bores deep into whatever his mythology is, and the end result is often what seems to me to be lightly whimsical. Even his horror never seems all that frightening to me (except for the Dr.-Destiny-in-that-diner issue of The Sandman). Gaiman’s work tends to play more like fairy tales. They may be dark, or they may be for adults, but they’re still fairy tales.
By contrast, Vaughn seems more comfortable adapting the work of a very different comic book writer in the form of Mark Millar. Is there a prominent comic book writer from that side of the Atlantic with less in common with Gaiman stylistically speaking than Millar? I don’t much think so.
Or maybe Vaughn just shouldn’t be directing fairy tales, even humorous ones like Stardust. There’s a lot going on, Vaughn was a fairly new director at the time, and it would take a director of phenomenal focus to pull all the different disparate threads on a movie like this one together.
What am I supposed to make of De Niro as a gay sky pirate captain, hiding his sexual orientation from his crew while doing things like crossdressing and doing Cox’s hair when no one else is looking? It just doesn’t seem to work right, and De Niro sticks out a bit.
Pfeiffer, at least, is having fun as an evil witch, looking for a downed star (that would be Danes). She needs the star’s power to retain her power and youth, and the more she uses of the last of the previous star’s reserves, the older she gets. Additionally, I was amused by the subplot of the princes plotting to murder each other in order to secure their father’s throne. That’s a terrible way to run a country, but the joke is the dead brothers hang around as unseen ghosts, still sporting the injuries and appearances they had at the moment of death. Those guys are actually a bit funny.
But no, instead we have Cox looking to bring a star back to Miller to secure her hand in marriage. Obviously, despite the kidnapping, he and Danes fall for each other instead, and it’s a fairy tale, so you can guess how everyone lives beyond the end of the story.
Stardust is the sort of movie that probably works out a lot better on paper than it did in reality. I may need to reread Gaiman’s original novel. It’s probably been a decade or so since I did that.
Grade: C-
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