It has been quite a long time since I have finished reading all accessible books by Tolkien and spent many hours talking to similarly "handicapped" friends, discussing the genius and mistakes of Peter Jackson and his adaptation of LOTR. ("Never mind Tom Bombadil, but how could they afford replacing Glorfindel by Arwen?" –"Wait, does that mean Aragorn was a gay in the book?"). Not that we came to any reasonable enclosures then, but I have been convinced that it is essential for the spectator to read the book first to enjoy the movie properly ever since.
I grew older and became a little bit apathetic concerning the “I too am capable of making a succesful fantasy movie” phenomena which followed the LOTR and Harry Potter madness.
Being a weanling of Anne McCaffrey, Eragon had not much to offer me even in the form of a book, so I was not surprised by the damnatory critiques on its movie adaptation. I have read the Chronicles of Narnia and preferred the old TV-series version to the new movie, despite of my personal connections with it. I saw trailers introducing Seeker: the Dark Is Rising and did not even take the trouble to remember it until the next morning.
But when last year came to its end, everyone around me started to behave and talk in a strange way. My intellectual, artistic, older friends (whom I would usually expect to tear such a thing into pieces as a childish kitsch) were stopping in front of a poster with an anorectic blonde girl and goggle eyed boy entitled something like Star…(Wars?) and discussing it with enthusiasm. I felt as if I had fallen from another planet and started suspecting that something shiny has appeared on the sky of fantasy movies.
A few days later I met Romeo and although he was talking about life with his usual critical cynicism throughout the main part of our conversation, he suddenly asked in quite an innocent, curious way: "Have you seen Stardust?" I gave him a rather inspective look before I answered: "Not yet." So could that be true? Could there really be some new fantasy-based movie worth seeing? It was tempting to go to the cinema and find out immediately. Unfortunately, in the real world it was about time for my next teaching lesson, so I said goodbye to both my dreams and my friend and forgot the matter for several days.
As soon as I took some not-yet-too-smelly cheese out of our simulation of a fridge and put it on a not-yet-too-stony slice of bread, she asked, innocently: "What are you going to do in the evening?" "It is evening," I sighed. "Moreover, I must study..." (I did my best to ignore her disappointed series of faces and hateful "of-course-you-must-study-Facebook" murmur as ostentatively as possible, and then…) "All right, all right, I am in, what kind of movie? If it is some stupidity not worth my time, I’ll…"
The shine in her eyes materialized in a single word: "Stardust". I almost dropped my dinner, as I jumped on the bed and said "Let’s go".
Well…in spite of my being in a rather skeptical mood and terribly tired, the movie did not let my attention get weary. I think I shed some sad tears once or twice, tears of laughter several times and I was pleasantly surprised times out of number. I only felt uncomfortable about Claire Danes as Yvaine, her “froggish” faces were sort of amusing sometimes. My idea of a fallen star is, let’s say, a little bit more airy. Otherwise, I loved almost everything about the movie. I loved captain Shakespeare (He has almost beaten Jack Sparrow on the list of my favorite pirates of all times), I loved Michelle Pfeifer as the disintegrating witch and I loved the music and landscape. And, last but not least, I was grateful for the happy ending and positive message in it. (It was a nice change after all those postmodern would-be-intellectual depressive books I had to read in December).
Some thirty or forty seconds after the movie’s end there was an unusual silence between us. Then my roommate took a deep breath and said something like…"Amazing guy this Neil Gaiman, isn’t he? I have been connecting his name only with Sandman so far…"
"No, wait,"said
Our voices united in such a heart-rending howl that all werewolves must have been ashamed that night.
My roommate has a part-time job in a cosy bookshop. And she is a bookworm. And she likes fantasy. But last year, when there was a clearance sale, she called me and said: "We’ve got some very cheap books here, one or two pieces of each kind, mainly some shoddy fantasy, can’t you ask those crazy friends of yours whether they want me to buy some for them?" And she sent me a list of titles and I forwarded it. There was one book on the list, which more than three of my "crazy friends" were interested in.
I remember the complication it caused when I sent the book to the girl who "won" the fight via another friend who lived close to her instead of taking it to a pub. I thought she would kill me for not bringing it personally. I raised my eyebrows then and thought "They treat it as if it was King John’s Bible, one day I must find out why."
Well, the day had come. The moment me and my roommate realized how close to getting a really cheap copy of Stardust and reading it before seeing the movie we were, made us feel like "magical flying morons".
About two weeks after seeing the movie, when I was “studying”, I found a discussion board concerning Neil Gaiman on Facebook. There were many angry reactions from true-blue fans, accusing the authors of the movie of changing the talking tree into the talking Moon, not involving Dunstan’s lover and, above all, not letting Tristan die!
What? Thought I. Such changes as letting the Moon speak to Tristan and thus advert to Yvaine’s being the daughter of the Moon, instead of saying it explicitly as in the book, belong precisely to the kind of the screenwriter’s mastery which leads to an successful adaptation. None of the abbreviations made in Stardust could have been as disturbing and confusing as those in Harry Potter series. But how the hell am I supposed to understand this death of Tristan? Would it be possible that the book and movie differ in such an essential “detail”? Did the witch kill him in the book or did Victoria become so jealous?
Yet suddenly I desired to borrow/buy the book no more. I did not want to find out. For the first time in my life I was grateful for not reading the book before seeing the movie. If there was no hope in the ending, if it all ends in vain even for Yvaine, when even fairy tales are not allowed to have the “happily ever after” part anymore, how can one believe in hope and comfort in the real world?
But I still found it hard to believe, that Neil could have done better with the movie than with the book, so I –again, for the first time in my life- ignored the spoiler warnings and read the plot of the book. And luckily so, because I realized that the hateful screams in the discussion were only crocks of the true difference between the book and the movie. The ending of the book is happy as well – in a way. The eternal solitude of Yvaine after Tristan’s natural death matches that of Arwen’s, when Aragorn passes away. I felt relieved and yet a little bit angry, because if someone pulled down my will to read the book, it was not the movie, but those true-blue book fans, criticizing every detail of the movie. I remembered my past “book-versus-movie” discussions and felt a little bit ashamed. The experience with Stardust has taught me that the deep-rooted book fans can in some cases do more harm to the story reputation than those who enjoyed the movie without reading the book in advance.
I wonder…shall I read Golden Compass before I am going to see it?
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