Luckily, though, the negative sides weren’t that bad. Sure, the music consisted of a constant blast of brass, deep strings and kettledrums, making every scene almost the same, music-wise. I have some issues with this because it seems a bit desperate: Instead of going for more subtle music and allowing the images and/or the action to speak for themselves/itself, the movie-makers throw on all this gaudy music, and to me this just sounds like the orchestral version of, “Oooh, hey, look at meeee! Loooook at meeee! I’m so awesome! Wee!” Fitting in some situations, but it kinda loses its impact when it’s used all the time.
Then there were the dialogues. Most of which were good, so long as it was on a trivial or humorous level, but the moment thy started dealing with issues of any substance, they became banal and almost embarassing to hear. It’s been a year or so since I read the book, but something makes me suspect that the dialogue — along with a lot of story details — were the parts most heavily edited from the book. This banality might also have been a result of the movie-makers attempt at making the “morale” or what have you more obvious and outspoken, and these kinds of things tend to be, well, just a long line of clichés.
Next we have the exposition. In the book, they took longer to establish a kind of normality (relatively speaking, of course; familiarity might be a better word for it), thus increasing the impact of the breaking of this normality (or familiarity). You know, the typical fantasy thing to do. And I get why they did this, because a book has so much more time than a movie. But it still felt a bit rushed and unsuccessful.
Finally, they changed quite a lot from the novella. Worst of the things they changed was perhaps the ending, which they coated with an extra layer of sugar, and then dipped in toffee. Other things were changed as well, some things were cut, and some added, as in most movie adaptions of books, and some were more annoying than others. Overall, however, things weren’t all that bad.
In fact, I thought it was a thoroughly enjoyable movie, and while they didn’t manage to get the full potential out of Gaiman’s novella, they did manage to create excellent entertainment. They also preserved a lot of Gaiman’s semi-absurd humour — Captain Shakespeare was amazing, the seven princes of Stormhold incredibly well portrayed, and Billy the Goat In Human Form was frankly astonishing.
I won’t stretch further than to a 8.0/10 on it, though, and I might reduce this to a 7.5 or even a 7.0 later. But I won’t go any lower.
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