The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the much hyped and long anticipated film based on the Douglas Adams books, sort of. It would appear that there was not enough information, and that of wrong type, contained in the books and so the story was liberally nipped and tucked in a way that only Hollywood can do. The Douglas Adams book of the title was brief and light but the film plods a bit. Overall Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is uneven and though it may satisfy some, the diehards who will flock to see this movie may be left unsatisfied.


First things first, yes I have read the books, all five of them, and I have read them more than once. Yes I did enjoy the books very much and I did get the jokes. The first thing you have to know about these books and about the film is that it was written by a British man and has quite a bit of that British humor in Black Adder and Fawlty Towers and Monty Python that just leaves some Americans scratching their heads. If you don’t like British humor you just won’t get this film, don’t even bother trying, just watch something else and let it go. Now the other problem is that having read and like the books I, and many other devotees, have very high expectations for the film. This can be a problem since most movies just can’t live up to the books they come from. See Lord of the Rings as an amazing exception. Of course with computer graphics directors are much better able to approximate such fantasy and science fiction stories which might explain why there are so many of them coming to the screen this year. The other thing one needs to really grasp some of the finer points of the books is a shallow knowledge of quantum physics. Not enough to cause any damage, just enough to know when the rules are being completely ignored. This proclivity towards quantum physics might be why the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy seems to attract a strange but devoted following.


Of course there is little need to worry about physics or British humor in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film because there is little presented that won’t be easily grasped by 97% of the audience. It is as if they did test screenings at the mall and removed any pieces that weren’t immediately recognized as funny. This is part of the problem with the Hitchhiker’s; it spends all of its time rushing around and leaves little of what makes the characters bigger than the universe characters.


Now the characters, and what they do, being the biggest part of the film, if you have problems here there is almost no recovery. As anyone who has read the books knows, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a story about a British everyman named Arthur Dent who gets whisked away by his friend Ford Prefect moments before the Earth is destroyed to make a hyperspatial express route and led on a series of incomprehensible adventures. The problem with the movie is that Martin Freeman’s Arthur looks the everyman, but is surprisingly up to the challenges of a really big universe. Arthur is much more capable and much less lost than the books would lead you to believe and this allows for less fun and most likely will preclude most of the material from the last two books ever being used for a movie. Ford Prefect, Mos Def, came across just as morally bereft, but a lot more huggy and cuddly than I would have given him credit for. But Def does a credible job here as an actor which is certainly more than one can say for most singers who decide they want to act.


The biggest disappointment was Zaphod Beeblebrox who, as the larger than life President of the Universe was something of a rock star in the books, brash, loud, great with the ladies, a real cool frood. In the film, Sam Rockwell, of Galaxy Quest fame, plays Zaphod more like a big irritating joke on the Universe. No one would think that Zaphod is cool, he is possibly the most annoying creature in the galaxy but there is nothing of the rock star to him, more like the absolute pain of a neighbor that you try to avoid at all cost. Maybe the joke is that he got as far as he did while having absolutely no redeeming characteristics but certainly not one to be called, as in the book, ‘The best Bang since the Big One’. Zooey Deschanel plays Trillian as a wooden sort of a girl; her science pedigree is left somewhat dangling in the film, who is left making moon eyes at Arthur for most of the film.


Now here I get to the crux of the biggest problem with Hitchhiker’s, the Hollywood need to take any story and shove a love story into it. Adams properly left Arthur’s love life until the fourth book, when the audience had already gotten to know the characters and the wackiness of the Universe. Not here, the preemptively sunk relationship of Trillian and Arthur is give full screen time here and it does nothing but fills time and slows the pace. Add in an extraneous character in John Malkovich’s creepy Humma Kavula and you have an extra half an hour that the film could have done without. In fact Malkovich’s character appears, makes demands, and is never heard from again in a way that makes him entirely irrelevant. The whole premise seems designed for a single joke, though an amusing one, that appears later in the film.


The one part of the film that truly delighted and lived up to expectations was Marvin the Manic Depressive robot. Though Marvin was shorter than I would have imagined, with Warwick Davis in the costume and Alan Rickman adding his sardonic voice to the character Marvin was all the things we have come to expect from the Universe’s most pathetic automaton. Marvin steals every scene with his one liners and even levels an army with his malaise. Marvin has a brain the size of a small planet and emotion issues on a similar scale. Add to that his small cute stature and one enormous head and Marvin adds up to exactly what he should be alone in this manufactured Universe.


Bill Nye puts in a solid performance as the whifty Slartibartfast once Magrathea is reached, but it is too little too late. Helen Mirren also makes an impressive guest spot as the voice of the computer Deep Thought but again, too little lost in a sea of unimpressive flotsam. It is interesting to note here how much these books have had an impression on an entire generation of people. Deep Thought was the name of the IBM computer that lost in a chess match to Gary Kasparov and the babel fish, as described in the book, lent its name to the popular website Babelfish.


The special effects are good but coming from the descriptions in the book there leaves a lot to be desired. Two talking couches is a poor replacement for an infinite number of monkeys with a script for Hamlet or any of the other side effects of the Heart of Gold’s Improbability Drive though luckily the whale and the petunias made the final cut. The best part of the special effects was the Vogons who reminded me eerily of the Urskeks from The Dark Crystal though they seemed cuddly in comparison. It probably has something to do with the fact that Jim Henson’s Creature Shop made the Vogons, but it is nice to see their work on hand again. The Vogons are repulsive but truly efficient civil servants for the universe who would feed you to a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal if you had the right forms and pull you out again at the last second if you had the right signature. Even the last lines of the film don’t make sense for anyone who has read the book. How can there be a wrong direction to get to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe when it is more about when you are than where.


With the silliness factor cut down and an extraneous love story tacked into the film Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an uneven adventure. I expect that the film will have a big opening weekend as all of Adams’ devoted readers see the film realization that Adams tried to bring to the screen for more than twenty years. But I imagine that the box office will drop off quickly as newer viewers do not develop an interest and the devotees go back to their highly preferred books. I know that Douglas Adams has a hand in the rewrite of the screenplay but I can not help but think that if he had not of died suddenly of a heart attack that maybe the film would have had a little more of his humor to it.