16 July 2005
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We Douglas Adams fans have been waiting a long time for a big-screen Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy adaptation for a long time, and I waited just a bit longer for it to hit the cheap second-run theaters.
Was it worth the wait, and the (reduced) ticket price? More or less.
There will never be a way to fully adapt a book to a film, let alone ones so literarily funny like the Adams oeuvre, but they made a decent attempt. This is a body of work that has appeared as a radio show, a series of books, computer games, a BBC series, and now a movie.
Well, somewhere along the line there was a picture book, but I don’t believe that it has been truly accepted as canon even as much as the short story “Young Zaphod plays it safe” has. The visuals here and there looked a little bit like the movie, but that might just be what I’m remembering of the wall-to-wall white decor of the Heart of Gold, the stolen space ship on which much of the action takes place.
For some reason I’d always pictured the Heart of Gold to be, well, a bit pointier. That wasn’t the only thing not quite to my expectations. The guns brandished here and there were all smooth and friendly looking, the very opposite of the Kill-o-Zap blasters described in the books as looking evil, with an end in front of which the target clearly and obviously didn’t want to be. Either the production designers wimped out or this just fell by the wayside.
A lot of incidental bits fell by the wayside. Never does Ford Prefect (played adequately enough by Mos Def) explain the importance of knowing where one’s towel is, nor even why he curses “Belgium” under his breath at one point. The filmmaker’s attempt to explain his name (having him attempting to shake hands with what looked like a Mini speeding toward him) and the joke therein (he picked the wrong dominant species, name-wise) was a nice attempt, but a bit lacking in the thought and execution departments.
On the other hand, turning it into something of a love story between Arthur and Trillian was acceptable, given that the books don’t lend themselves well to a single narrative that would clock in under four or five hours. I’m thinking that there’s a little bit of the puppy-dogged moping and unrequited love/lust to be found in the books (that I just wasn’t looking for when I read them) but it was certainly cranked up a notch or two. Bully for them, it basically worked.
I’m going to get into more of the meat of things, so if you don’t want things spoiled don’t click on the “more” link below. Suffice to say I think I got my money’s worth out of this film and will look forward to seeing it again on DVD, provided there are tasty extras. I know the producers hoped for the opportunity to film a sequel, and I for one welcome the opportunity to watch one.