Stardust

With Minor and Casual Spoilers

Stardust was... basically a waste of time and six bucks. Over the years, any project involving Gaiman brings a bit of suspicion with it. I remember enjoying Sandman, Wolves in the Walls, and his run on Miracleman, but he increasingly seems unable to wring a new storyline, idea, or moral from the words he inks down, instead reusing old concepts, characters, and worldviews, though he does manage to come up with novel arrangements of otherwise standard fantasy fare for the atmosphere of his books. Which brings us back to Stardust. Stardust, from start to finish, is just a naive tween parable made enticing to its intended audience through passing wink-and-nudge acknowledgements of "real world" issues like sex and cross-dressing and the addition of a few minor (and generally obvious) reversals of expectation (ooooh!) done mostly just to be the subversion of the formula without adding to experience or plot at all (not to mention not being violations of the greater equation at all). As is increasingly standard in much of Gaiman's lighter work, the movie is full of Romantic but simplistic morals and lessons as well as unsubtle affirmations of the true and secret value of those that don't fit in. Mind you, amiably un-dashing Protagonist is never really shown as being all that unusual and, in fact, neither is anyone else. The main characters, all 2-dimensional and none of them charming, differ little except by overarching goal and what role they have been shoe-horned into by the script (an easy task, given how little room their personalities take up). Tristan, whose name is probably a pun, is an awkward, superficial, dim little man with the social graces of a friendly man with asbergers whose only redeeming quality is that he's "nice". That he's a good noble young hero, rather than just one that's learned (or rationalized) a persona type to get by and self-validate in the face of his other failings, is never actually shown. He's shown being bullied, weakly, but only backs down because he is terrible at swordplay. The original love-interest, who is supposed to has been heavy-handedly condemned as shallow and self-absorbed in dialogue by the end, is really barely worse in any of her failings than Tristan, who obviously fell for her because she's pretty rather than anything else, thought he could essentially buy her with a gift and gave her up primarily because some other pretty girl said she actually did like him (for some unaccountable reason, given he was a dick to her, tied her up, knew her for a week, and displayed no clue of caring for her or of heroism). He's never charming or clever, displays only the most basic level of concern for his fellow man, and in fact really earns nothing he gains. Instead, he makes do entirely by the three breeds of luck that only come to the undeserving: Fool's, Beginner's, and Author's Preference. Everything is a gift, from serendipity to the remarkable speed of becoming a master swordsman in under a couple of day or having a falling star find True Love with you in under a week thereby granting you immortality without having to make any sacrifice at all. It all comes out like the game of make-believe played by a ten-year old boy who thinks reading a lot is enough to make him smart, lives with a house full of sisters, has no friends at school, and a crush on a pretty girl he feels is fully justified until his best friend (a new girl) changes his mind by telling him that she likes him. Story itself dull, made palatable only through copious window-dressing. Even simple characters can be used to show a great grand story, but so few meaningful plot points occur and so little depth is explored, it never gets more complicated than a bedtime story told by an uncreative father who needs to get back to the Television before commercials are over. Nobody grows up, learns anything, makes a difference, or encounters real conflict. The Cabbage Patch Kids dealt with greater moral ambiguity than does Stardust and Harold and the Purple Crayon was as convoluted. Boy wants girl, boy is secretly a prince, boy gets treasure to win girl, boy takes his time getting back while other people try to get it by following from a great distance, boy is magically handed a bunch of presents, boy kills some witches, boy gets girl that's a lot easier to get, boy is king and lives forever in perfect loving happiness, credits roll. Even the trappings and props, though relatively pretty, were sort of old hat already. Whether it was the pseudo-poetic price for a magic flower or gypsies or flying sky-fishermen (No! They're PIRATES! Wait, no, sky-fishermen), it would only reek of the Wonder of the Impossible if you haven't already been through any of Gaiman's earlier works at all. Of course, he does manage to throw in an oblique and unnecessary reference to Shakespeare, if that's your thing. He has a serious fetish for that deceased, negligent-father of a playwright. All in all, it was just disappointing and I wish I'd waited until it was on the budget theater screens before I threw money at it.

Maybe the book is better. I've got it somewhere, a gift from someone, so I'll take a look, but my tolerance is made a bit lower by having seen the movie first. But I don't think it will be.