Don’t panic, it’s pretty good. Or, more to the point, it’s not too bad.<\/p>\n
“Bad” is certainly what I was anticipating from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy<\/a> movie. My low expectations were the result of two things: (a) a scathing pre-release review<\/a> written by MJ Simpson, Douglas Adams’ biographer, who blasted the makers of the film for, in his word, “leaving out all the jokes”; and (2) my personal opinion that Hitchhiker’s<\/em> is fundamentally unsuited for the big screen. Yes, I know it’s already been made into a radio play and few television shows and a text adventure game and, for all I know, a breakfast cereal. But of all the forms of media, film is the least kind toward absurdity, and Hitchhiker’s<\/em> is a profoundly absurd work.<\/p>\n Both of my concerns proved to be true: The silliness in Hitchhiker’s<\/em> didn’t translate well, and they took out most of the jokes. Fortunately, the second ameliorates the first, and the whole thing turns out about as good as this particular adaptation could possibly be.<\/p>\n Here’s an example that Simpson, in his review, cites as proof that the material was given a joke-ectomy:<\/p>\n Book<\/b><\/p>\n “I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”<\/p>\n “That’s the Display Department.”<\/p>\n “With a torch.”<\/p>\n “The lights had probably gone.”<\/p>\n “So had the stairs.”<\/p>\n “But you found the plans, didn’t you?”<\/p>\n “Oh yes, they were ‘on display’ in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the leopard.'”<\/p>\n Movie<\/b>:<\/p>\n “I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”<\/p>\n “But you found the plans, didn’t you?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I remembered reading this when the line “I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them” cropped up in the film. But instead of thinking “They’ve ruined a classic!’ I found myself musing, “well, yeah — the other way probably would have been too long.” Blasphemy I know*<\/sup>.<\/p>\n Which isn’t to say that Hitchhiker’s<\/em> trademark silliness is completely missing — it’s there, but watered down and spread out. The movie intersperses bits from the book — scenes lifted directly from the novel, guide entries, etc. — with traditional motion picture fare like action sequences and muted bits of exposition. It’s as if they decided to just split the difference between Hitchhiker’s<\/em> outlandishness and Hollywood’s reluctance to think outside the proverbial box. Granted, Hollywood gets the upper hand in the end, but up until that point it works pretty well.<\/p>\n Martin Freeman makes for a pretty good Authur Dent; Dent isn’t the complete loser he was in the books, but he’s still pretty useless. Mos Def does an okay Ford Prefect (though his performance is so sedated that he makes Ford seems like a secondary character) and I liked Sam Rockwell’s Zaphod quite a bit. And Zooey Deschanel is very pleasant to look at, though the character of Trillian was considerably altered in the adaptation (she’s a lot nicer in the film).<\/p>\n Truth be told, I agree with almost everything MJ Simpson says in his review — the film isn’t terribly funny, the plot is now full of “convenience and unexplained happenings,” Marvin is all but superfluous — but I don’t agree with his conclusion that the film is “vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad” and “the script is amazingly, mindbogglingly awful.” More to the point, I think that the movie would have been worse if they had been more faithful to the book, and I’m a bit surprised they managed to make it even halfway decent. Not exactly a rave review, but better than the one I’d expected to write.<\/p>\n Don’t panic, it’s pretty good. Or, more to the point, it’s not too bad. “Bad” is certainly what I was anticipating from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy movie. My low expectations were the result of two things: (a) a scathing pre-release review written by MJ Simpson, Douglas Adams’ biographer, who blasted the makers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}