Stardust is a 2007 romantic fantasy adventure film directed by Matthew Vaughn and written by Vaughn and Jane Goldman. Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, it follows a young man who crosses a wall separating an English village from a magical kingdom in order to retrieve a fallen star, only to discover that the star is a woman. The film stars Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, Sienna Miller, Mark Strong and Peter O'Toole, with Ian McKellen as its narrator.
The story combines a romantic quest with a struggle for a royal succession and a group of witches seeking immortality. Although presented as a fairy tale, it treats magic as dangerous, physical and frequently absurd. Princes murder one another for a crown, dead characters remain nearby as sarcastic ghosts, and apparently terrifying pirates are mostly concerned with protecting their reputations.
Plot
The English village of Wall is named after the stone barrier that separates it from the kingdom of Stormhold. A guard prevents anyone from passing through its only gap. Eighteen years after a young man named Dunstan Thorn secretly crosses the wall and meets an enslaved princess, his son Tristan lives in the village and unsuccessfully courts Victoria Forester.
When Tristan and Victoria see a star fall beyond the wall, Tristan promises to retrieve it in exchange for her hand in marriage. Using a magical Babylon candle left to him by his mother, he is transported directly to the impact site. There he discovers that the star has taken the form of a young woman named Yvaine, whose leg was broken by the fall. Tristan binds her with a silver chain and begins taking her towards Wall, initially treating her as an object that can be presented as a romantic gift.
Yvaine was knocked from the sky by a ruby thrown into space by the dying king of Stormhold. The king's surviving sons must recover the stone to determine which of them will inherit the throne, and the ruby now hangs around Yvaine's neck. At the same time, the witch Lamia learns that consuming the heart of a fallen star will restore youth to her and her sisters. Yvaine is therefore pursued both by princes who want the ruby and witches who want her body.
During the journey, Tristan and Yvaine are captured by the crew of a flying pirate ship that harvests lightning. Its commander, Captain Shakespeare, is publicly feared as a murderous pirate but privately enjoys dancing, fine clothes and hairdressing. Shakespeare teaches Tristan to fence and helps the pair continue their journey while maintaining his own carefully manufactured reputation.
Tristan gradually abandons his desire to impress Victoria and falls in love with Yvaine. Her feelings for him cause her to shine more brightly, while despair makes her light fade. After confronting Lamia and the remaining princes, Tristan learns that his mother is Una, the lost princess of Stormhold, making him the last surviving male heir to the kingdom. Tristan and Yvaine become its rulers and eventually use another Babylon candle to return together to the stars.
Adaptation
Gaiman developed Stardust with illustrator Charles Vess as an illustrated serial first published in 1997. A prose edition followed in 1999. The story drew on pre-Tolkien traditions of English fairy tales, in which the magical world could be beautiful, arbitrary and casually lethal rather than governed by a detailed system of rules.
The film retains the novel's central journey, the competing searches for Yvaine and the boundary between Wall and Stormhold, but reshapes the story into a faster and more conventional adventure. Captain Shakespeare, a relatively minor figure in the book, was greatly expanded for the film. The final confrontation with the witches was also made more elaborate, and the film gives Tristan and Yvaine a more openly triumphant ending.
Robert De Niro's performance as Captain Shakespeare deliberately plays against the intimidating criminals and authority figures for which he had become known. The character uses that same intimidating presence as a disguise, performing brutality for his crew and enemies while concealing the life he actually enjoys. Much of the film's comedy comes from characters discovering that apparently fixed identities—a star, a pirate, a shop boy or an ageing witch—are less stable than they first appear.
Production and music
Vaughn had previously directed the crime film Layer Cake (2004). For Stardust, he and Goldman combined location photography, constructed sets and extensive visual effects to give Stormhold the scale of an epic without abandoning the physical quality of an illustrated storybook. The film was produced in the United Kingdom and filmed at Pinewood Studios and several British locations, with additional landscape photography in Iceland.
Ilan Eshkeri composed the orchestral score. The British group Take That recorded “Rule the World” for the film, and the song plays over the closing credits. It became a major hit independently of the film and remained closely associated with it.
Reception and legacy
Stardust received a modest theatrical response in North America but performed more strongly internationally and through home releases. It subsequently developed a substantial following as a film that combines romance, adventure and comedy without treating any of them as an interruption of the others.
The film is particularly remembered for Pfeiffer's performance as Lamia, whose beauty repeatedly decays as she uses magic, and for De Niro's Captain Shakespeare. At its centre, however, is the reversal of Tristan's original quest: he crosses the wall intending to possess a fallen star and returns having learned to recognise her as a person capable of choosing whether to remain with him.