Marcus Mattsson

Spoilers ahead!

After watching The Seeker (or The Dark is Rising, or whatever you wanna call it) I was actually looking forward to Stardust. It seemed like a more mature fantasy movie compared to most of what’s on the market now, ie. it hasn’t got a kid in the lead role. The plot is quite simple, in a countryside town bordering on a magical land, a young man, Tristan, makes a promise to his beloved Victoria (Miller) that he’ll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm. Inside he meets the star, in the form of a girl, Yvaine (Danes).

I don’t think I’ve seen a movie that varies so much between really good and extremely bad. The script could really have used a couple of rewrites, the movie would’ve been a lot better. All in all, the movie suffers a lot under the writers taken advantage of creative licence. On the other hand, the movie is funny as hell, and the fight scenes are awesome; for example, the protagonist has to fight a corpse being controlled by the main antagonist, a witch (Pfeiffer), who’s manipulating a wax figure, one witch is hit by a flying sword making her crash into the wall and a goat-turned-human tries to head butt an unicorn, which also sets him flying into a wall. Also, Robert De Niro’s character Sheakspeare, a flying pirat who collects lightning, is very cool. You’re initially totally convinced he’s a psychopath who’s gonna rape Yvaine, but as it turns out he’s a fruity transvestite. Another antagonist is one of the seven heirs to the throne, Septimus, who’s searching for a ruby Yvaine’s got, which will make him king. The entire story line about the heirs is very entertaining as well, it starts out in their castle with the four remaining sons of the king, who explains that the son who finds the ruby will be the king (although the tradition is that the last surviving son will be the king), so the four sons set out to find the ruby and kill their brothers, a killing spree that starts of in the king’s chamber as one son is pushed over the balcony and the king laughs hysterically. Also, the sons have blue blood; a nice little touch. One of the really bad and cliché parts though, is the fact that Tristan is the last heir to the throne, because his mother, who’s been imprisoned by a with since he was born is the long lost daughter of the king (all the sons die).

There’s also a lot of cliché crap, for example, the witch, who’s trying to kill the star, thus being able to live forever. She has at least three chances to kill her but doesn’t. As mentioned the writers also took advantage of their creative licence, there are a lot of coincidences and stuff that doesn’t make sense, for example the part with the witch not killing the girl when she’s got the chance. The ending especially ruins a lot of the movie, first of all, after Tristan falls in love with Yvaine he goes back to the real world to tell his former love, Yvaine misunderstands this so she thinks he doesn’t love her, and the setup is just ridiculous. Afterwards Tristan is fighting with the witch, she is about to kill him, but then she cracks down because her sisters are dead and she has nothing to live for anymore, at this point you could literally hear the cinema go ‘WHAT?!’ Seconds later, as the couple is leaving, she starts laughing and shuts all the doors with her magic, okay, it was just a trick, stupid. Then Yvaine hugs Tristan and suddenly a blinding light from within her disintegrates the witch… Apparently she couldn’t do this before, because ‘she needed Tristan’, kinda dumb.

All in all it was a bit disappointing compared to what I had hoped for, but I’d still recommend it.

Stardust: 6/10.