Having recently seen 2007’s fantasy flick “Stardust,” I feel compelled to write my thoughts on the movie.

“Stardust” is what you’d get if you took Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult movie “The Princess Bride,” loaded it up on CGI excess, paired the light and frothy humor with some out-of-left-field graphic violence, sprinkled it with a few dozen helicopter shots lifted from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings,” and then tweaked it in places with a “Terry Gilliam” Photoshop filter. The result is something of a mess, very occasionally approaching something good before veering off into derivative territory.  

Bland hero Tristan inexplicably wants to win the affections of Victoria, his quasi-Victorian village’s resident alleged hottie, despite her treating him like dog food. If Tristan can retrieve a fallen star from the other side of the less-than-impressive five foot wall that divides the village from the generic magical kingdom of Stormhold, she’ll marry him instead of her fiance, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Cary Elwes. After using a Plot Device Teleportation Candle to travel to Stormhold, Tristan discovers that the fallen star has taken the form of Yvaine, played by Claire Danes with a weird blonde dye job, apparently filling the role that Gwyneth Paltrow would have played if this movie had been made several years earlier. But Tristan and his new stellar lady friend are on a collision course with wackiness, as evil witch Lamia wants to capture Yvaine and eat her heart to gain eternal youth, while scheming Stormhold princes want to retrieve Yvaine’s necklace and kill each other to ascend to the kingdom’s throne. Throw in some oddball scenes with Robert De Niro continuing the tired “tough bad ass who’s hamming it up for laughs” schtick he’s been doing since “Meet the Parents” and “Analyze This” as a cross-dressing gay air pirate with a tough facade (picture “The Princess Bride’s” Dread Pirate Roberts as a stereotypically fey hair dresser), and you’ve got a slick and shiny special effects showcase whose moments of genuine heart are adrift on a sea of l33t-k3wl CGI.

Part of the problem is the film’s wild shifts in tone. It wants to have its cake and eat it, too – a foundation of straight-up fairy tale, at times slipping into the sort of parody and satire that was “The Princess Bride’s” hallmark, before slapping us in the face with surprisingly grisly scenes of witches ripping out the intestines of small animals, or trying to pump the proceedings up into the sort of epic that Jackson’s “LoTR” was with swooping ‘copter shots of our leads wandering around the same sort of majestic landscapes of fields and mountains that appeared in the Tolkien-based films. The scheming Stormhold princes murder each other in a variety of calculating ways, but they’re played for laughs more often than not – a prince in a tub, his neck slit, gushing buckets of…blue blood. Perhaps it was the late hour of my viewing, but it all just seems rather…off. It’s almost as if the straightforward love story/”Princess Bride” homage between Tristan and Yvaine (no spoiler warning, since this part of the film’s a straight up fairy tale it’s pretty blatantly obvious that he’ll ditch the village popular girl in favor of the star), the darkly comic princes, and the scenery-chewing intestine-fondling witches are from three distinct movies. When De Niro minces his way into the film piloting a half-Zeppelin/half-pirate ship, he brings with him a heaping dose of wannabe Terry Gilliam straight out of “Time Bandits” or “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” but without that director’s sheer inventiveness. All these disparate elements don’t always mesh together seamlessly. The film seems to want to be all things to all fantasy fans, but it’s never focused enough to consistently deliver the goods. (A few “it’s in the script” moments don’t help, such as when a certain character develops a superpower in the film’s closing minutes, a scene which prompts rounds of “why didn’t she just do that before?”)

My other big problem with the film was its glossy sheen. Director Matthew Vaughn was obviously proud of his CGI team, calling upon them to wallop us over the head time and again when a simpler approach would have been more effective. Take the scene where the evil Lamia creates a fake inn to trap Yvaine and slice out her heart – where it would have been preferable to show a simple, more fantastical and imagination-powered depiction of the inn rising from nothing, Vaughn swoops and swirls us around an elaborate CGI construction fest before flying the camera inside, as the inn’s interiors spring to life amidst a swirl of green computerized fire. It’s the sort of modern fantasy film where everything is spelled out in CGI icing, leaving us with no need to imagine, no fantasy or wonder. Vaughn seems to hate the thought of getting the audience to use our imaginations at all. In fact, it’s when the movie jettisons its overwrought effects work that the solid fantasy film underneath can occasionally peek out from behind the curtains. As corny as it is, the romance between Tristan and Yvaine does work, and it can be genuinely affecting when it’s not being pushed aside by effects set pieces. The film’s simplest moments are its most effective – as Tristan and Yvaine gradually fall for one another, she develops a stellar glowing effect whenever she’s overcome with happiness from being with him (she’s a star, after all). These scenes of a beaming Danes softly glowing with pure joy from having found her one true love are far more affecting, and have more lasting impact, than all of Vaughn’s multimillion dollar set pieces combined.

Buried under the uneven tone and overcooked CGI is a sweet and simple fantasy that wants to get out. Perhaps others might latch on to that, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to get past the rest of it all to embrace it.