I have been playing on and off with the idea of starting a blog, but watching Stardust cinched it. I will not stand for my favorite genre being exploited so.
Mind you, Stardust is not a horrible movie. It's no Eragon or Dungeons & Dragons. But it is mediocre, and it's this reckless mediocrity that crushes my soul. You see, fantasy these days seems to inevitably fall into two categories: making a sad attempt at originality or riding the coattails of Tolkien or C. S. Lewis. The former is sad precisely because it relies on the latter more than it knows. Gone are the days of Conan the Barbarian and The Princess Bride; these are now relegated to the same stagnant "inspirational" pool as the great British epics (well, not Conan--the gutless worms of Hollywood possess not the courage). Stardust chose The Princess Bride to be its muse, despite having a perfectly good Neil Gaiman story that it mostly ignored in the pursuit of its own goals. Being unable to lie, I will not pretend to have read that story myself, but the film had the stink of Hollywood "adaptation" all over it, and my investigations on the Internet confirmed that the mood of the book and all but mere traces of its originality were missed in the movie.
However, I am a paladin, not a professional film reviewer. I am here to preach. I see this film and others like it, and I fear for fantasy. This genre, which along with sci-fi holds the greatest potential for mold-breaking, is being relegated to a standard. The beauty of fantasy is the freedom it grants to the storyteller, who can use metaphor to send messages with the ability to pierce to the heart of the human experience. Fantasy is nothing if not pure, unadulterated metaphor. Why would we be interested in looking at a world completely unlike our own unless it meant something to us, in the same way as a dream or myth? Few of us have dreams that make much sense, and most are inconsequential, but we all have had a handful of dreams that, while bizarre like the rest, meant a great deal to us. You all know the ones I'm talking about. The ones that cause you to wake up thinking hard about your life and your situation, but are still too weird to explain easily. You just know, without quantification, that they were meaningful. Ideally, fantasy should reflect a similar feeling. Fantasy, like the myths and fairy tales that spawned it, is a dream of society. A genre that ought to be unfettered by the banality of real life, that has the ultimate freedom to say whatever it wishes, should never become so typecast as it has now. I want to see movies that no longer throw away the magic of a fantastical story for a few pop-culture ribs and video games that can pull off a fantasy world without putting orcs or elves in it. I want to see exemplary acting, intelligent dialogue, exciting fight scenes and lots, lots more grubby peasants. Give us a different reality, not our own force-fed through a glitter machine. And make that new reality say the things about our real world that we could never say except in dreams.
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8 comments:
Nicely done, Paladin! I have to say, your zeal and idealism are quite inspirational, I really enjoy it when you get a good rant going. I have to admit that I set middling-to-low expectations for Stardust after having read the book several times and imagining what it would be like after running through the Hollywood machine, and because of that jaded outlook managed not to achieve the insights about it that were so plain to you.
I suppose I wasn't too disappointed (or at least surprised) when every serious, profound moment from the book was marred by a quickly-added joke to keep the movie "light" so that it basically ended up as a Shrek-esque fantasy/fantasy spoof/un-chuckle-worthy family-comedy with plenty of pretty pictures for the kids, overly short and disappointingly nonepic fightscenes interspersed with love/lust scenes for the teens, and a healthy smattering of corny sex jokes that keep the adults feeling catered to and amused. At least it didn't deviate too far from the plot, and had a higher budget than the extremely earnest but sorely underfunded BBC production of Neverwhere.
Knowing the source material, it could have been much, much more poorly adapted, so a mere total inversion of the book's deadly, even (dare I say it?) Grimm seriousness is (at least for me) only long-suffering-sigh-worthy instead of bloodvessel-bursting-rage-worthy. I'd very highly recommend the book to you, as Neil Gaiman uses it to vividly illistrate a mastery of the Faery Tale that you're probably the only person I know qualified to understand and appreciate fully.
At least I can take some cheer from the fact that it and other Neil Gaiman titles are highly unavailable at our local library due to their sudden popularity, so more good than harm has been done in that area. I'm glad you're not content to accept only such small victories, though, and perhaps your Crusading spirit will inspire our generation to start taking Fantasy as seriously as we should be. I look forward to more of your blogging!
Alex
Thanks. It's nice to know that others share my opinion. Nerds unite against mediocrity! I like the sound of that.
Fantasy films can do whatever they want, including nonsense pop culture references, so long as they don't do the unforgivable, which is throwing a whole bunch of sparkly magic crap on the screen and hoping to pass it off for world-building. Throw more magic creatures! More spells! More epic but totally generic music! And British accents!!! Must have the accent, even if you suck at it!! All epics must have British accents, even if it doesn't make any sense to have them!
We need people to start crafting worlds again on screen. And these films need to stop doing the whole "good versus evil" thing, which really cheapens the enormous potential of fantasy. I know its one of those old-fashioned standbys that fantasy really enjoys, but binary moral universes are not compelling to anyone but kids anymore. Fantasy, like sci-fi, has such potential to challenge you, but unlike sci-fi, is woefully represented in cinema.
True, but world-building in and of itself is not all it takes. The best example I can think of is Waterworld. The world in that film was actually quite well-wrought. What brought it down was its sub-par acting, plodding pace, plot holes, and most of all, stupid dialogue. The world made the film a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise, but it was not enough to save it.
@ Captain Fuzzball:
I think the idiocy of binary moral universes is what draws me (and others too) to Miyazaki movies instead of Disney's tripe. It's old, tired, and irresponsible in this age of more complicated morality.
white hart:
You're right, it ain't everything, but if someone takes the time to world-build, it's the genesis of quality and originality. It's the first necessary step towards making good fantasy; you can trip and fall on your ass after taking the first step, but at least you had the right idea about where to go. Those movies that don't take that first step have doomed themselves to walking a crappy cinematic path.
And my analogies sorta suck, but I think the point's in there somewhere.
sladuuch:
Amen, brother. Amen.
I agree with you, Paladin. It is quite deplorable what has happened to the genre. I've tried giving up reading the stuff, because there is so much junk, but I still can't get enough of it.
Perhaps fantasy needs to get over the worldbuilding approach that was pioneered by Tolkien and Lewis. It's been done too much. Eragon was written with that approach and it failed to contribute anything new. The worldbuilding approach explains everything too well, often killing the "magic" of the world. I think fantasy should stay closer to its roots of fairy tales, myth, and metaphore and leave some things ambiguous and mysterious. The movie Pan's Labyrinth is a great example of this. It left some things ambiguous and didn't concern itself with the world of the fairies too much. It simply told a story that had fantastical and symbolical elements but also related to what we call reality in a very human way.
Well written article.
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