STARDUST: 10 YEARS ON!

“A philosopher once asked, ‘Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?’ Pointless, really. Do the stars gaze back? Now, that’s a question.”

Matthew Vaughn’s speciality is Comic book movies. Between Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class and the Kingsman franchise, he’s been a constant presence for these films, and if reports are to be believed, his next film could be about either Flash Gordon or Superman (we’re hoping Flash Gordon).

But going back even further than Mark Millar or Marvel, Vaughn’s first comic book movie was his adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, which arrived in UK cinemas ten years ago this week. Before it was published as a novel in 1999.

Vaughn’s film, which stars Charlie Cox as a shop boy who comes of age while dragging Claire Danes’ fallen star across the magical realm of Stormhold, is a loose adaptation of the story, but it’s a really entertaining family film of the kind that has disappeared from cinemas in the last decade.

Since the film was made, Gaiman’s works have had more popular adaptations, such as Laika’s excellent Coraline and Amazon’s lavish adaptation of American Gods. Also, the BBC is currently shooting a star-studded series based on Good Omens, his collaboration with Terry Pratchett.

But Stardust had a rougher road to the screen, with Miramax and Terry Gilliam previously having a bash at bringing the story to the screen.

Gaiman has called his story a fantastical spin on It Happened One Night, while Vaughn has said that Midnight Run was his frame of reference while making the film – those films are not so dissimilar in structure, and you can certainly see both in Tristan and Yvaine’s journey back to the tiny English village of Wall.

It’s simply taken for granted that stars can fall to earth and when they do, if they happen to land in Faerie, they take the form of young women, who are in grave danger of having their hearts ripped out of their living body by witches who know that eating such a heart will allow them to live forever.

There are the brothers of a dead king who follow the family tradition of choosing the new king by process of elimination for the succession to the throne of Stormhold: They do their best to murder each other and the last man standing gets the crown.

There’s also a woman who has been enslaved by an evil witch and can only get her freedom when there’s a week with two Mondays and other unlikely events.

And there’s the young man, Tristran, who is desperately in love with a girl who really has little use for him, and who promises to marry him when he brings back a fallen star only because she doesn’t believe that he can do it.

The enviable casting goes beyond the princes too. Robert De Niro, Sienna Miller and Ricky Gervais round out the main cast, and there are brief appearances from David Kelly, Melanie Hill, Henry Cavill, Mark Williams and the legendary Peter O’Toole to boot. That’s an extraordinary line-up, and Vaughn shows the same affinity for an ensemble that made him a good fit for X-Men, and continued in Kingsman.

The shape of the movie was drastically changed by the decision to beef up the part of Captain Shakespeare of the sky pirates. Casting Robert De Niro was fantastic. With De Niro, he was given a chance to do comedy, and it created the space in which the movie could do what the book didn’t do: Show a gradual transformation in the feelings of the main characters toward each other.

Shakespeare must appear as surly and rough as any seafaring marauder in order to successfully lead his squadron of scalawags, but in private quarters, his touch is light as a feather — a whole plume of them, to be exact, as we see him traipsing around in frocks and wearing period makeup. This was definitely the film’s riskiest move, but De Niro’s cross-dressing, comedic approach paid off

Michelle Pfeiffer is a witch — for the second time. Thirty years ago this summer saw the release of another, decidedly different fantasy film: The Witches of Eastwick, also based on a novel and also featuring Michelle Pfeiffer as a witch. Pfeiffer’s performs villainess roles to a tee in Stardust, Lamia, gives the film its bite and spark. (The filmmakers actually expanded her role from that which is found in the novel once Pfeiffer signed on.) Lamia is a cruel and wholly vain creature who would happily cut the heart right out of Danes’ beautiful Yvaine in order to stay young and beautiful — and to Pfeiffer’s credit, her charm and beauty is part of what makes Lamia so undeniably watchable.

Claire Daynes kept lighting her part up like a Christmas tree. Without any special effects, she radiates love and joy, with a kind of natural, voluptuous, homespun beauty that takes your breath away. Charlie Cox is a terrific discovery –he is a fine actor whose face can be heroic or naive, full of love and hurt by turns (and we know by his standout performances as Daredevil on the small screen).

The Scottish Highlands, Isle of Skye, and areas in Iceland were all tapped for scenic location shots, and the historic Elm Hill in picturesque Norwich, England, which dates back to the 11th century, served as the stand-in for Stormhold.

As a filmmaker who usually winds up toning down more extreme source material, be it Gaiman’s mature fairy tale or Millar’s controversial wish-fulfilment fantasies, Stardust must be seen as the starting point of the Matthew Vaughn we know now: a filmmaker who has both a sincere mischievous sensibility and a strong commercial instinct, and he shares a knack for adaptations with Jane Goldman. It’s funny, inventive and romantic and in many ways, it is still his very best film.

If you love love stories or delight in fantasy films, you would be foolish to miss this one. Many of the performances are extraordinarily good.