fine whine

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.

The movie's supposed to be a hundred and four minutes long, but in retrospect it didn't seem like that much to me. The beginning several minutes is consumed by an amusing but altogether too long song and dance number with some dolphins ("So long and thanks for all the fish") that wouldn't be out of place in a Sea World revue, but the joke wore out quickly and I was impatient to get to the real meat of things.

Which started up eventually, and several pages worth of the book (and a number of minutes and inevitable false starts in the computer game) of Arthur Dent (Morgan Freeman, well cast and acted) recovering from a hangover and realizing those yellow things outside are in fact bulldozers poised to knock down his house. This is not to say that the whole 'putting on a dressing gown, searching for buffered aspirin' thing is worth filming, but still, it's been in the other incarnations and I feel just slightly sad it's gone. So Arthur wakes up and is soon laying in front of a bulldozer, discussing matters with Prosser (one of the more fleshed out bit characters in the books, played well enough by one third of the League of gentlemen). I was disappointed that Ford didn't convince Prosser to lie in front of the bulldozer, which is an amusing bit of chicanery, but probably too talky for today's moviegoer. Alas.

I had thought the Vogon constructor fleet ships were yellow, also, but what do I know?

Vogons? Don't get me started about Vogons.

Having been somewhat re-cast (and made more significant) as the villains of the piece, the Vogons seemed to have gotten the bulk of the creative attention, and it shows. Their ship is rife with subtle touches (the green exit signs) and grandiose, ridiculous sets like the towering microphone for the poetry reading. Too bad the people who made everything look interesting forgot to make it sound clear, as much of the poem Jeltz recites sounded to be word-for-word true to the books, but I couldn't make out all of the words. Ford and Arthur are tossed into the airlock much too soon, having skipped over the banter between the two of them and the Vogon guard who was all but absent from the script. As it turns out, the airlock sets a funny scene, albeit one marred (as well as one thereafter) with Nokia's product placement. And then we receive another drawn out, overdone sequence of something in space, which is revealed to be The Guide. Emblazoned across one of its covers is its title, coincidentally the title of the movie, but we'd already seen the titles during the dolphin song. Did somebody miss a memo?

I can't write everything about this movie; I've already skipped a number of flashbacks rife with contrived plot. Such is life. During the overly long 'book in space' bit, though, the music is itself something of a flashback, reminiscent of the music from the radio drama and BBC series. That and the appearance of the BBC Marvin on Vogsphere, Stephen Fry, and probably other bits of homage I didn't notice, show that the creators were in fact aware of what had come before. After all, I was.

Anyway, it wasn't bad. I laughed a lot. I agree with criticisms I've seen pointing out the movie's lack of cohesion and music-video style, but I can't find too much fault with it.

Well, other than that there's only one of it. How about some sequels, guys?