Okay “Stardust” FINALLY came out in the UK this week – a film I have been extremely anxious to see due to my love of the source material on which it is based. I’ve always been a big fan of Gaiman’s work, and his original novel “Stardust” was no exception – I just fell in love it, an epic fairytale that quickly became one of my favourite books. And so when I found out a film adaptation was on the way that actually had Gaiman’s blessing (with Gaiman even involved with production) I was very intruiged. Could it possibly do one of my favourite books justice?
I read somewhere (possibly in his own blog) that Gaiman has learnt to form “realistic expectations” for adaptations of his work. You have to remember when judging an adaptation that you can’t expect too much – a perfect 100% faithful adaptation of a peice of literature to film could never work, because the two things are different mediums, a direct transfer like this would just be a mess. The work has to change in order to make that shift from book to film, so you can’t expect too much or you are destined to be dissapointed by film adapations. What is important is that the film remains true to the spirit of the book.
I tried to keep these “realistic expectations” in my mind when going to the cinema – and, as a result, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure there were ALOT of changes from the book – many things were cut, but the cuts seemed necessary (wikipedia tells me that an audio version of the original novel clocks in at 10+ hours). The journey from the wall to finding the star for example had been completely removed, and the adventure was set over a single week rather than the extended period in the novel.
I’ll get the complaints over with first – by and large what I disliked wasn’t what was removed, but what was added in. In the book Tristan and Yvaine do fall in with a crew of sky pirates, and there is a captain with which the two become friends with HOWEVER he is not a camp transvestite. This just seemd like a horrible and heavy-handed way to add some extra humour to the fairytale, and for me just came off as utterly cringeous (although there was a fair amount of giggling from the audience). Most of the book’s humour (and Gaiman’s in general) was very dark, and a lot of this was lost in an attempt to garner a PG rating and rake in the family audience – I can’t really complain about this as I have no doubt that if the humour and violence were portrayed as it is in the book the film would have never got produced (adult fantasy films are far and few between). There were many other changes in the book, the climax for example was very different – alot more action packed, but this really didn’t bother me.
As mentioned the film did stay true to the spirit of the book – the only thing that was really lost was some of the darker humour, and still a lot of this was retained (and I can tell that the writers made a real conscious effort to walk the PG line, keeping as much of the dark humour in as possible). In conclusion this, for me, was a very succesful adaptation – with some well chosen neccesary changes and a few regrettable ones! Nice job.
