This is a review of "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy," perhaps the most derided, certainly the most controversial entry to ever come out of the great canon of Douglas Adams. Looking for something to while away a quiet Saturday afternoon with the youngest I chose to dig out the 2005 feature film adaptation as it had been a) a very long time since I'd originally seen it (Thankyou for the freebie Empire magazine... I've never forgotten your kindness) and b) it seemed an ideal way to introduce it to a 4 year old who doesn't realise he has a boxset of the novels waiting for him when he gets older.
Back in '05 my thoughts, simply put, were as follows:- "HHGTTG film officially "Not ****"!"
And to be honest, six years on, I think that was me damning it with faint praise.
"...There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
I am definitely a fan of the originals (whichever you want to class as the originals). I love the novels, and the radio shows and the TV Adaptation. Arthur Dent will forever be personified by Simon Jones. Douglas Adams was a genius writer (when he could get around the almost permanent state of writers block that he seemed to live in in the latter part of his life). His death in 2001 deprived the world of, not only a great comic talent, but also an ardent futurist and commentator on our world and our treatment of it.
However, being as big a fan of the original Hitchhikers doesn't mean that you need to be utterly slavish to the original material in bringing it to a new generation and, for that matter, a new medium.
Did it hold up as a movie in its own right? Oh Yes. Absolutely categorically.
Does it hold up as a HHGTTG movie? In 2005 I answered that it was less clear, so now I think it's ripe for a reappraisal.
The issue with any literary adaptation (and not just in the case of translating Douglas words onto the big screen) is that movies are a visual medium. Rule number one is "Show, Don't Tell." In the case of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by showing and not telling you miss the whole point of the book / radio series whereby we are being told the story by The Book. You would never write an original movie from scratch about the same subject with the conceit of The Book itself narrating the plot and its background for us. And, of course, it wouldn't be Hitchhikers without the book. So what can you do? What did they do? What any self-respecting literary adaptor would have to do. They trimmed the unnecessary. They made the verbal and descriptive visual and expanded upon it while remaining true to the spirit of what came before.
Case in point. The introduction to the film takes the very short line about the Dolphins final message to mankind being "So Long and Thanks For All The Fish" and turns it into a three minute song and dance number performed by Dolphins. One line. Three minutes. Normally dead credits time, put to good entertaining use. Pure cinematic class from the first minute onwards.
Casting a film is, to a certain extent, always going to be an exercise in personal opinion (In this case that of the director, producers and casting people), but I can't argue with any of the choices made. In the odd case it might have seemed like a bizarre decision, but it all works.
Firstly, and most importantly, Martin Freeman proves himself capable of carrying the heavy lifting on a major motion picture with our new Arthur Dent for the 21st Century (I'm convinced this film will have been his calling card for The Hobbit). Arthur always needed a slightly world-weary everyman quality which Freeman has in spades and was the main reason he was the best thing about The Office and he continues to demonstrate this in Sherlock. Rapper turned actor Mos Def was, potentially, the bizarrest casting decision ever. Who could have known how well he'd work as a slightly understated, but still distinctly off-the-wall Ford Prefect? So what if he's an american? It makes the line about not being from Guildford even better! Sam Rockwell is the Zaphod Beeblebrox the universe has been waiting for. Zaphod is meant to be a larger than large, outer than out-there rock star and has demonstrated his ability in such roles before. A perfect fit. And then filling out the main cast is Zooey Deschanel. What can you say about Zooey Deschanel without dissolving into a gooey mess of gush. Kooky without being irritating. Smart, sexy and a perfect fit for the Arthur/Trillian relationship. (The first time we see her on the Heart of Gold don't those hot pants just give you a... shiver!) Not a dud amongst them! Even the secondary cast of voice actors and puppet masters, lead by Stephen Fry as the voice of The Book and Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin, are a cherry on top of the cream. Only Stephen Fry could lend The Book the necessary gravitas without becoming ponderous. Only Alan Rickman could inject a necessary hint of sarcasm into the weary tones of Marvin! I can't imagine this film working with any other cast.
It has to be mentioned at this point that the best cast in the universe wouldn't have a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys chance in a supernova if they had to perform this film on a budget of tuppence ha'penny. Luckily, the budget is considerably more than that and it appears to be all on the screen. The design-work is sumptuous. From the simply elegant proto-iPad book (Now isn't that an app we're all waiting for?) to the simply astounding scale of the Vogon Constructor fleet or the Magrathean construction floor. And it's clever as well. The Heart of Gold, powered by an Infinite Impossibility Drive, that was basically created by a really hot cup of tea, look like a tea-cup and saucer. How perfect is that? Even with the pre-ponderance of CG work that was required to make a film of this scale work there was still plenty of physical items to make it feel solid, most importantly the design and realisation of the Vogons. CG Vogons wouldn't have worked. The vast slobbering animatronic Muppets (They were created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop) bring proper life to beings that could have been rather dull and two-dimensional. The design department really were a bunch of hoopy froods.
"...almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea..."
You can't write about this movie without making some kind of comment on the changes. The different stuff. The stuff that had the DNA die-hards leaping about and gnashing their teeth like Doctor Who fans when they're told the Doctor is half-human! Douglas always tinkered with Hitch-hikers. Every version differs from the previous ones in some way, shape or gelatinous multi-form. It never felt like change for changes sake, but it did keep the material fresh and by the time the movie came out it was, in parts, 25 year old material so contempt, bred by familiarity, was a definite danger. So, whether your feelings towards the new stuff are good, bad or indifferent it definitely had every right to be there.
Humma Kavula appears to be a setup for a plot arc that doesn't get resolved, and I suppose was deliberately left hanging for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. He's not really a fully formed character. He's a plot device to get the crew to Magarathea and get the Point of View gun into their possession for the climax. It's not like Douglas never wrote characters like that before either and Humma's position as leader of a religion built out of the whole "Great Green Arkleseizure" thing is within the previously established universe, so ultimately doesn't seem out of place.
And the side-trip to Vogsphere also expands on something only previously skated across in previous incarnations of Hitchhiker. A full-on exploration of the Vogon's and their homeworld was well overdue and if anybody else had imagined that it would come across as a fantastic cross between Brazil and The Dark Crystal I'd have been very surprised.
Finally... Arthur and Trillian... The lurrrrve story. Arthur has always fancied Trillian. And lets face it, without the girl, and the party he completely failed to get off with her at, none of this infinitely improbable story would have happened (which is explicitly pointed out in dialogue in the movie), but she's never been that bothered about him before. To borrow a well known phrase, she wasn't that in to him. And Arthur needs her and more importantly the emotional connection she represents to not only whats gone before, but what he's striving to reach. Come on. They make a cute couple. Get over it already!
"Share and Enjoy!"
"The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" (2005) has its supporters and its detractors. As with any piece of literature or film it has its faults and foibles, but it is still a remarkably entertaining couple of hours that I would happily dig out on occasion.
In conclusion, it's sadly obvious that the time for Hitchhikers as a 'movie franchise' has been and gone. Those that made the decisions obviously felt that continuing with Restaurant wasn't the direction they wanted to go. And that's a shame, but we still have this film. For one shining moment The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had a shedload of money thrown at it with an A-list cast and it rose above its humble BBC origins. It's never going to go away and it can sit proudly on the shelf on a shiny disc (the whole concept of which I'm sure
always appealed to Douglas himself) next to the CDs and other DVDs and books and sequels and computer games and towels. Hitchhikers will never end. It will never go away.
So long and...
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