Last weekend, I revisited the movie Stardust, which is one of my all-time favorites, as well as the ultimate example of that romantic fantasy road trip structure. I hadn’t watched it since I initially started developing that theory and used it to help map out the structure, so it was interesting to revisit.

First, to address a related issue: I’m aware of the disturbing allegations against the author of the book the movie was based on and don’t want to promote him. I’m not even sure I’d be able to read his books right now without being a bit uncomfortable. But I look at the movie as being its own entity. A movie is a collaborative effort involving hundreds of people. He didn’t write the screenplay, and the screenplay veers fairly significantly from the book in a number of ways. I’ve found that the things I like most in the movie aren’t in the book. The book doesn’t really fit the romantic fantasy road trip that well and is structured differently. So, I’m not letting the author of the book the movie is based on being an alleged creep ruin one of my favorite movies for me.

One thing I noticed was that the protagonist doesn’t meet the love interest/traveling companion until 28 minutes into the movie, which is approximately one-quarter of the way through. That’s pretty common in most of the movies that fit this trope, which is interesting, given that in a romance novel, you generally want the hero and heroine to meet as soon as possible, preferably in the first three chapters — if not the first chapter. These stories come closer to fitting the Hero’s Journey structure, in which the traveling companion/love interest is part of the “new world” the hero enters in the threshold crossing that comes when he takes on the quest. That usually is at about the 25 percent mark. It also fits the “Save the Cat” structure, in which the break into the second act and the meeting of the B-story (romance) character happens at the 25 percent mark, with the hero taking decisive action toward the goal and meeting the love interest at that point.

In this movie, we spend the first quarter of the movie with a bit of a prologue showing our hero’s origins, then we see the life he’s living and the fact that there’s something he wants that we as the audience can tell is not what he needs — he’s in love with a village girl whose only interest in him comes from her knowing she can manipulate him and get what she wants. We also get the setup of the big-picture plot in the magical world, with the king launching the ruby into space and declaring that the prince who finds it will win the crown. Then the ruby knocks a star out of the sky. Tristan finds his opportunity when he spots the falling star and swears to the girl that he’d go into the magical land on the other side of the wall to bring the star to her. His goal is born when she says if he brings her the star before her birthday, she’ll marry him — but his romantic rival is also planning to give her a ring, so if Tristan isn’t there with the star by then, she’ll marry the other guy (a young and unrecognizable Henry Cavill). Then we get the setup for the antagonist, with the witches planning to go after the fallen star, and we get Tristan learning about his history and getting the tools he’ll need to go to the magical land where the mother he’s never known lives.

The movie spends the next quarter on the phase I call “bickering,” as he and the fallen star, who turns out to be the woman Yvaine, travel together. She’s not at all keen on being presented as a gift, but he has a way to get her back home in the sky that he promises to give her if she’ll come with him as proof that he’s retrieved the fallen star. But a lot of this section is taken up by what the antagonists are doing, as the princes continue killing each other until they’re down to two and they both set out to find the ruby. Meanwhile, we see what one of the witches (an absolutely delicious Michelle Pfeiffer in a very different fantasy role from what she played in Ladyhawke) is up to in her quest for the star.

Which brings us to the midpoint, when one of the princes, Tristan, and Yvaine all show up in the trap set by the witch. This is the part I call “Attack,” and when Tristan and Yvaine escape together, we start to get the Bonding portion, where they start to get to know each other and find things they like about each other. In general, the bickering phase is when they’re focused on what they don’t like about each other, then surviving the attack together forces them to look at each other again, so they start to find things they like about each other. And there’s dancing. I’m not sure why there’s dancing at this point in so many stories. I had a friend who used to joke that the dancing in the Disney movies was a metaphor for sex, so she found it hilarious when Aurora says, “I don’t even know your name,” after the “Once Upon a Dream” dance in Sleeping Beauty. In the Hero’s Journey, this is a part called Seizing the Sword or Reward, which is often a bonding time. Dancing together requires trust and synchronization, so it’s a good visual shorthand for a growing bond if the characters can move as one.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I love this movie so much. I think it’s the combo of fantasy, romance, humor, and adventure. The main character has a solid growth arc. It’s a coming of age story — as the narrator tells us, it’s about how a boy becomes a man. There are secret identities and revelations. The villains get their comeuppance. People who’ve been separated are reunited. The cast is pretty astonishing. Even some of the minor roles are played by recognizable people, in some cases because they became famous later. Robert De Niro isn’t the sort of actor you expect to see in this kind of movie, especially not in that kind of role, but he seems to be having an absolute blast.

One fun thing about this viewing is getting to see something like Rydding Village. The village scenes at the beginning and end of the movie were filmed in the village that was the starting point for my mental model of Rydding. Once I started writing, I added, subtracted, rearranged, and changed elements, but my starting point was this village in the Cotswolds. I watched a lot of videos from people walking through this village to set the imagery in my mind, and it’s fun to see the village dressed for a different time period. Apparently, this village is often used for films, and years ago a film company paid for the village to get a central TV antenna on a nearby hill and underground cable from it to all the houses so there wouldn’t be any TV antennas in the town that they’d have to take down. Just about all they have to do to make it serve for anything from the 1600s through the Victorian era is dump dirt over the paved streets, change out the signs in shop windows, and add whatever set dressing they need for the story.

I have one personal connection to this movie. They based a lot of the look on the illustrations in the original illustrated version of the book, painted by Charles Vess. He was the artist guest of honor at the local science fiction convention back in Texas a bit more than ten years ago, and as the Mac expert on the convention staff, I helped him set up his new MacBook and get it ready for him to do his presentation. He gave me the chocolate from his guest gift basket, and I have a signed print of a painting he did for the convention. When I have a real office again, I’m going to get it framed to hang in there.

Last weekend, I decided to go back to where it all began and rewatch the movie that got me started thinking about that whole romantic fantasy road trip subgenre, which made me realize it was a thing that I like, which made me realize that a story idea I had long ago actually could fit into that, which led me to replot it and try to write it. I’m currently rewriting it (I’ve been working on it off and on, but I’ve also written seven other books and a number of novellas since then), so since I found this movie on Hoopla, I thought I’d rewatch.

Back in early 2021, I started watching a fantasy movie called The Crown and the Dragon on Amazon, and very early in the movie I knew that this was a kind of movie I’d like, so I stopped it to go make popcorn before settling down to properly watch it. It perfectly fit what I later identified as the romantic fantasy road trip story structure. I’d never seen it before, but I knew each major beat that would happen — not really predicting the outcome, just knowing where the turning points would be. It was interesting rewatching it after doing so much thinking about this topic.

This movie is just barely fantasy cheese. It looks gorgeous. There’s not a lot of info on IMDB, but based on the names of most of the production crew, I’m guessing it was filmed in Ireland. The cinematography is excellent, the score is good, and the acting is far above most fantasy cheese. The actors are neither wooden nor overdoing it. Most of them don’t have a lot of film credits, so I’m guessing they mostly cast Irish stage actors. The two things that drag the movie down are the effects and the plot. Any time a dragon shows up, it’s painful. It’s like someone taped a stick figure drawing of a dragon to the film, or else like a really bad Photoshop job where you can tell that an image has just been pasted into another image, without correcting the light angles, shadows, etc. Then there’s the plot.

Not that the plot is necessarily bad. There aren’t big holes or logical leaps. It just seems to be missing a lot of context. I’ve watched this movie twice, and I still don’t have a good sense of what’s actually going on. The heroine is on a mission to bring a particular item to a castle in time for a king to be crowned, while the bad guys are trying to stop this, and yet we never see the king and we don’t really know why he needs this item. The item’s actually needed for fighting a dragon. We don’t know who the bad guys are or what they’re trying to do. I know fantasy writers are encouraged to leave some of their worldbuilding off the page because you don’t have to explain everything, but you do need to leave the stuff that’s essential for understanding the story. This movie feels like it was based on an 800-page novel that had to be cut down to a two-hour movie, and then the movie had to be cut to under 90 minutes so it could be on TV. Given that this movie is just under 90 minutes and has transitions that seem like they were created to stick in commercial breaks, I wonder if maybe it did start as a longer movie, then the only distribution it got was on TV, so they ended up cutting the stuff that explained the plot.

But it really does fit my pattern. We have the hero and heroine striking the bargain for him to help her get to the castle. There’s bickering along the way, until they’re attacked by the bad guys and barely escape together, which leads to a bonding scene and later to dancing. At their destination, he’s ready to leave her to her destiny, but then he returns to her and helps her achieve her destiny.

The romance is satisfying (though a bit more development in the middle might have helped). The fantasy elements had potential if they’d been explained a bit more. They needed much better dragon effects because that was 1980s-level bad, even though this movie was from the 21st century. There are some continuity issues (that may result from things being cut), like the heroine falling in mud in one scene and the same clothes being pristine in the next scene, or the hero having nothing but the clothes he’s wearing, and then in the next scene, with no explanation he has on different clothes and a sword. Or the time he drops the sword and dives into the ocean to escape a bad guy in one scene, but then in the next scene he has the sword again after he’s out of the water. All in all I’d say the impression is good fantasy cheese that’s a bit frustrating because with a bit of work and a slightly bigger budget it could have been a good romantasy movie. The people making the movie did a good enough job with what must have been a tiny budget that they should have been able to get the chance to go on and do bigger and better things. I remain annoyed by the scarcity of good, big-budget fantasy films. There’s clearly an audience, but aside from the Lord of the Rings movies, it’s like the studios have no clue what to do with them. They don’t know how to pick projects, and they utterly fail in promoting them, which then creates the self-fulfilling prophecy that fantasy movies don’t do well enough to justify the budgets they require.

I did check The Huntsman: Winter’s War out of the library, and I was surprised to find that it was much, much better than the first movie. It’s still high-budget Fantasy Cheese, but it was much better structured than the first movie.

As an aside, I figure I should define “Fantasy Cheese.” The quick and easy definition is “the sort of thing the Sci Fi Channel used to show on Saturday nights,” but then I had to think further to figure out what that meant. I think for me it boils down to underdeveloped fantasy that’s mostly a string of tropes. So, generic quasi-medieval European world with no development beyond that of what the society is like, the standard character and plot points without much to make them unique. In books, I’ve heard this referred to as “extruded fantasy product.” It was the sort of thing that got published a lot in the 70s and early 80s when people wanted more stuff like The Lord of the Rings, and so we got works that were essentially based on LOTR without any further development. I think it can be fun for movies since a lot of the nuance and development never makes it to the screen anyway, and there’s something satisfying about a favorite trope done well. A lot of these movies are low-budget, so there’s a bit of a camp factor to them. They’re kind of cheesy and predictable. These are fantasy movies not to be taken too seriously but that can be fun to watch.

But back to The Huntsman. The main thing for me was that the heroes had actual goals, both on the story level and the personal level. We knew what they wanted and why, and those things had emotional resonance. There was interpersonal conflict with emotional stakes. And the heroes got to be proactive rather than just reactive.

The way I define “proactive” is that the heroes are trying to do something other than just escape from or counter the villain. If all they do is respond to what the villain is doing, that’s reactive. If they have their own plan that they’d be carrying out regardless of what the villain is doing, that’s proactive. They’ll still have to deal with and react to the villain, but the villain is getting in the way of them doing something. In the first movie, Snow White was purely reactive up until the end. She was just trying to get away from the queen, so if the queen stopped chasing her, there would be no story. You have a proactive story if the heroes would still be doing something if the villain left them alone.

This movie is both a prequel and a sequel. There’s an extended prologue (maybe about 20-30 minutes of the movie) that gives some of the backstory of the queen from the first movie and her sister and how the sister becomes the Snow Queen (that’s the fairy tale this movie focuses on). Then it gets into the backstory of the Huntsman from the first movie and how he and his future wife were taken by the Snow Queen and trained to be part of her army of warriors, then goes on to show what happened to his wife and how he got to where he was in the first movie. And then it skips ahead to after the first movie, when the magic mirror has gone missing and Snow White’s husband asks for the Huntsman’s help to find it and get it to a safe place where the Snow Queen won’t be able to get to it. So he sets out on a quest, running into someone from his past along the way, and he learns that things in his past weren’t what they seemed.

There’s some humor and some decent action sequences that had an emotional core, so I didn’t zone out during them. Emily Blunt makes a wonderful villain, with a kind of fragile vulnerability beneath her icy exterior. I found myself actually caring what happened.

This one actually might work best if you don’t try to connect it to the first film because there are some continuity gaps, and this movie makes some of the pivotal stuff in the first movie an even bigger “huh?” There’s a bit of a Once Upon a Time (the TV series) thing, with the Huntsman from the Snow White story turning out to also be one of the kids from the Snow Queen story, and the Snow Queen and the Evil Queen from Snow White are sisters (in that series, it seemed like all the fairy tale characters were either related to each other or were mashups, with the same person playing key roles in multiple fairy tales).

In general, this is a good popcorn fantasy film with some good performances, gorgeous costumes, and a decent story. I don’t know that I’d buy the DVD unless I find it on the bargain shelf at the used bookstore, but it’s a fun watch. I think it’s currently available to watch with ads on Freevee (what used to be IMDB-TV).

Since I’ve been watching the Rings of Power series, I was in the mood for a fantasy movie last weekend, and I didn’t have time to watch any of the Lord of the Rings or Hobbit films since most of those run about three hours. I found a fantasy film on Amazon called Dawn of the Dragonslayer that worked pretty well and was less than two hours.

I’d put this in a similar category to the kind of fantasy movie they used to show on Saturday nights on the Sci Fi Channel (back when it was the Sci Fi Channel instead of SyFy) that I called Fantasy Cheese, only it was much better executed. It was filmed on location in Ireland and they had a good director of photography, so it looked utterly gorgeous, and there was a good score to go with all the lovely imagery. They had an actual castle to use as a location, so the setting looked real. The acting was mostly strong (it seems to have been a cast of mostly Irish actors who do a lot of theater work). The script was so-so. It may just be that I’ve spent too much time studying story structure, so it’s hard to surprise me, but I felt like it was very by-the-numbers and a bit too predictable. On the other hand, it was the kind of predictable that’s satisfying — a key factor in good Fantasy Cheese. You know what’s going to happen, but it’s what you want to happen.

The story was about a farmboy whose father was killed by a dragon. It was his father’s wish that he leave the farm and go to be a bondsman to a nobleman who owed the father something, with a sealed message the farmboy was to bring the nobleman. The idea is that the nobleman will train the farmboy to be a knight, and he’ll be able to move up in the world. Except the nobleman is down on his luck and out of favor with the king, so although the sealed message definitely gets a reaction, he only takes on the farmboy as a farmhand, not to train him to be a knight. But the nobleman has a beautiful, scholarly daughter (of course), and she has a rare book on how a knight should be trained and an even rarer book on how to be a paladin who can battle dragons and survive, so she trains him in secret — when comes in handy when the dragon returns.

The low budget mostly showed in the lack of cast and in the bad special effects, and I think those things affected the story. It’s a really small cast, and there are no extras, which made it feel like a really empty world. The farmboy walks across the land from his farm to the nobleman’s castle without encountering a single person that we see until he reaches the castle, and there are several other long journeys (some requiring camping overnight en route) in which the characters never see another person or even a sign of civilization, and this is not a plot point. We never learn that the dragon has wiped out most of the people, or anything like that. Aside from a few farmhands, there are no servants at the castle. Maybe that’s because the lord is down on his luck, but a wealthy elderly noblewoman who’s a relative comes to visit, and she has no servants with her, not even a lady’s maid. A wealthy and powerful young nobleman with eyes for the daughter comes to visit, and he doesn’t have any servants with him. I guess since there are no people, they were able to safely travel without guards. I think the script could have used this to add a bit of worldbuilding, but since the lack of people wasn’t acknowledged, it just made the world feel empty and artificial.

And the CGI dragon itself wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t integrated well into the “real” footage, so it looked like one of those bad Photoshop jobs where they just stick something into a picture and it’s obviously pasted in. That didn’t bother me quite as much as the heroine having Jennifer Anniston hair with face-framing layers and a heavy-handed modern makeup job. If you’d told me there was a deleted scene saying she was a time traveler who’d fallen through a portal from 2010, I’d have believed it.

But aside from those quibbles, it was an entertaining and lovely to look at fantasy movie with a running time of under two hours, which is rare.

Really, fantasy movies seem to be oddly rare now. The 80s were a heyday of fantasy films, with things like Dragonslayer, Ladyhawke, Legend, Labarynth, The Princess Bride, and Willow, along with more sword-and-sorcery type stuff like the Conan movies, Krull, and The Beastmaster. And while some of them were based on books, there were several that were original stories.

But in spite of the success of the Lord of the Rings movies, Hollywood didn’t seem to capitalize on it with more fantasy stuff. There were the Hobbit films, which were the same universe and filmmaker, and the Narnia movies, but otherwise I can’t think of many fantasy films other than a few of the fairytale-based movies and the Disney live-action remakes. They seem to have headed for TV instead, with A Game of Thrones and the spinoff, Wheel of Time, and Rings of Power. There are a few other things that kind of fall into the fantasy category, like the Pirates movies and some of the Marvel movies, but there’s not a lot of what I call “traditional” fantasy, with a quasi-medieval setting, castles, wizards, etc. And all the more recent fantasy I can think of is based on books or some other pre-existing property. Not that I have any problem with turning fantasy books into movies or TV series, but it does make you wonder where the original stories are. Are studios so risk-averse that they only fund things based on something that’s already got a fanbase, or are writers not coming up with their own fantasy stories? I scrolled through the entire fantasy category on Amazon last night, and there’s very little of what I would consider “fantasy.” Most of it is more horror or science fiction.

I need more horses, castles, knights, wizards, dragons, etc.

That filmmaker who did Dawn of the Dragonslayer (who also did another good Fantasy Cheese film I watched last year, The Crown and the Dragon, which I think is set in the same universe as this film) should maybe try writing a script that actually uses the practical limitations she’s dealing with and that doesn’t require a dragon. Write about a witch or wizard in a lonely place, doing magic that requires minor CGI to show, and no CGI creatures, and let the director of photography have fun with the scenery.