The film also nods to Terry Gilliam’s post-Flying Circus work, bearing some striking similarities in particular to The Brothers Grimm. Vaughn has been heartily upfront about how much his film owes to Rob Reiner’s wonderful The Princess Bride, even happy to highlight the fang-marks left in the print by Monty Python. So, does Vaughn pull it off? Well, Stardust is certainly more coherent and infinitely more audience-friendly than MirrorMask, and Vaughn and Jane Goldman’s script pins down the flightier elements of Gaiman’s fairy tale (not least of which is the very concept of a star taking the stroppy, Timotei’d, hippie-princess form of Claire Danes) with a sharp, hard-edged sense of humour. Of course, his X3 diversion a few years ago suggested he was primed for a change, but when Vaughn announced Stardust as his eventual follow-up to directorial debut Layer Cake - which swaggered in the same crime genre that Vaughn had made his name in as producer - it seemed as likely as Guy Ritchie suddenly announcing that his next project would be a cute-robot space adventure.
So while Stardust, the second big-screen adaptation of Gaiman’s work (in collaboration with artist Charles Vess), is due to be followed by a clutch more over the next few years, you still have to give producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughn credit for tackling such tricksy material - and in a genre that you wouldn’t readily associate him with, too. 2005’s MirrorMask was visually arresting, but its Lewis Carroll-meets-Salvador Dalí oddness (floating hermaphrodite giants?!) bounced it too far out of reach for a mainstream audience. It’s fair to say that the big screen has yet to warm to Neil Gaiman’s idiosyncratic brand of fantasy.