For a period of time in my tweens, our Sunday nights followed a certain ritual. Me and my two siblings would sit on the sofa, ignoring the fact that school was on the next day, and put on our battered DVD copy of Stardust.
The first time we watched it is lost to history, but its effect isn’t. Over time, it has become something of a cure-all, treating everything from a bad day at work to an overdose of adult cynicism.
Why does it work? Probably because it’s so unashamedly cheesy. Stardust was adapted from a novel by Neil Gaiman, but for my money, the film is the version that’s more enjoyable. For those not aware (probably most people), it tells the story of Tristan Thorn (a pre-Daredevil Charlie Cox), a young man living in the type of England only Americans could dream up: that is, hopelessly twee and quaint.
Desperate to prove himself, he sets out on a quest to a magical land to retrieve a fallen star, but things go sideways when it turns out that the star isn’t an inanimate object. It’s actually a person called Yvaine (a post-Romeo+Juliet Claire Danes), and there are three witches trying to track her down and eat her heart.
Cue a big, unabashedly romantic adventure (complete with the prerequisite sweeping soundtrack) as the pair bounce around the mythical continent of Stormhold, before inevitably falling in love.
Stardust never really made waves when it came out in 2007, except in my family. Our house was an unapologetically nerdy one. We were raised with Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings; magic was, for a long time, the air we breathed.
That said, those who thumb their noses at the traditional fantasy-ness of it all are really missing a trick. Spiritually, this feels like a successor to the 1987 classic The Princess Bride – though, thankfully, with Claire Danes’s character given slightly more to do than Buttercup.
Her prickly attitude (complete with the power to incinerate people via the power of starlight) was fascinating to my timid people-pleasing tween self, while Michelle Pfeiffer chews scenery so enthusiastically as the lead witch, Lamia, that she goes beyond terrifying and into the realms of pure camp.
To be honest, the whole thing is an exercise in pure camp, as well as a fair amount of excessive (some might say unnecessary) world building. Over the course of the run time, we encounter inns created out of magic, fallen stars that happen to be human, pirates that go around harvesting lightning on sky ships and a certain amount of sly jokes that hint at there being even more backstory that never made it out of the writer’s room. Where did Babylon candles come from? As with most things, we shall never know.
Watching as a child, it was sheer catnip for my imagination – and that’s without mentioning the absolutely stacked cast, which went entirely over my head when I was younger, but these days reads like a who’s who of big names.
Claire Danes! Rupert Everett, playing a ghost! Mark Strong, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller, Ian McKellen … the list goes on. And that’s without even mentioning Robert De Niro as a supposedly fearsome pirate with a penchant for wearing tutus – something that made us howl with laughter as kids. Or Henry Cavill, who has a small role as Tristan’s rival suitor Humphrey.
Does it stand up to a rewatch? As with most things, some elements have aged badly. The modern feminist in me balks slightly at the idea of Charlie Cox’s Tristan having to save Yvaine in the film’s final act – or the fact that Michelle Pfeiffer’s scenery-chewing witch is evil because she’s terrified of ageing.
It goes without saying, but the entire film is also fearsomely naff – something that definitely didn’t come from the book.
But that’s part of its charm. I went back and read Gaiman’s novel for the first time after university. I remember feeling distinctly unimpressed: the story, while broadly the same, seemed to be lacking some sort of whimsy, or the sense of breathless adventure that made the film such a delight.
Where Gaiman’s prose comes across as dry and detached, Stardust the movie is not. It’s openhearted and warm, a story in which the good guys win and the baddies ultimately get what’s coming to them.
In a world that feels increasingly fractious and scary, how comforting to know that Stardust is always waiting to sink into: like a warm bath, it’s an antidote to all things stressful.
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Stardust is available on Peacock and Hoopla in the US, to rent digitally in the UK and on 10 in Australia
