Last week, I reviewed a modern fairy tale movie called Winter’s Tale. It was not very good. After we watched Colin Ferrell and his Pegasus become stars together, my fiancee urged me to watch another modern fairy tale movie called Stardust. This one, she assured me, was much better, and given its pedigree, I had no reason to doubt her. The film is based off of a book by Neil Gaiman, one of the greatest authors of modern fantasy and fairy tales working today, and directed by Matthew Vaughn, one of my favorite modern filmmakers. No matter the quality, watching a movie forged by such different artistic voices had interested me for some time.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that Stardust is a good movie. It’s got all the trappings of a fairy tale story: inanimate objects that are somehow alive, magic, other worlds, true love, etc. But unlike Winter’s Tale and other failed films in the genre, the rules of its universe feel somewhat intuitive and the character drama is earned. The tone and feel of the film is reminiscent of The Princess Bride. It’s a love story at its center, there are moments of danger and menace, but it’s generally a light-hearted adventure story.

This being said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a tiny bit disappointed with Stardust, due primarily to my own preconceptions of what a Matthew Vaughn movie is. Considering his work on Layer Cake, Kick-Ass, Kingsman, and even X-Men: First Class, I was expecting a flair to the action or a bluntness to the proceedings that isn’t actually here. Vaughn’s influence is mostly invisible, and what is here is likely a pretty straightforward adaptation of Gaiman’s novel. There’s nothing WRONG with it, it’s just not as unique or specific as I was hoping for.

There’s also a feeling that Stardust, like Winter’s Tale, is somewhat abbreviated from its source material. There are lots of fun and clever background details, and the characters and their motivations are all clear enough, but the world feels slightly less alive without Gaiman’s prose and insight. It’s possibly a necessity of the adaptation, but it still feels like a weakness.

Once again, there is nothing obviously wrong or flawed with Stardust. It’s a pretty good movie! The cast (including Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller, and Robert De Niro in one of his better late-career roles) is all game, the look is competent (although the CGI is already pretty dated eight years later), the tale itself is enjoyable, and the story ties up several largely-disparate plot elements into a neat bow at the end. It just feels like it could have been something more. The film finds very little to make it interesting in its own right, and rarely aspires to be anything more than a screen-adaptation of a clever book.