Strangely Stitched-Together

Rating: 5/10 (24 February 2015)

I approach Stardust as someone who has not read the source material, so I do not have the benefit of being thrilled to see familiar characters brought to life on screen. For me, this is a very strangely distant, disjointed film. There are plenty of interesting ideas, clever lines and fantastic images, but the whole simply does not engage me.
The problem, I think, is the directing. The angles, shots, editing; they do not assist the actors and visuals in connecting with the viewer (read: me). It feels like an anthology of scenes that are linked by story but not put together in such a way as to comprise a cohesive whole. As someone else said, it is "episodic." Perhaps that is how the book is, but if so, then I would question the wisdom in adapting such a structure. It feels like a classic example of something that is only the sum of its parts, not more.
As someone who generally enjoys fantasy, is a big fan of Claire Danes and can appreciate a story that plays imaginatively with genre tropes, I expected to enjoy Stardust more. I suppose that to some extent, it just does not synchronize to my sense of aesthetic or sense of humor, the way that it does for other people.
Ultimately, I think that this film is simply a matter of acquired taste. Many people find it tremendously engaging, beautiful, inspiring, romantic. I can see the shards of those things, but ultimately I find myself bored by how it is all put together. So in my estimation, Stardust is an interesting bit of cinema, worth watching once, but not one of the classics.