The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy reviewed
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and in many different formats. One of those formats is a major motion picture, and the introduction to the Guide's entry on this picture begins like this:
"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie,' it says, "is boring. Really boring. You just won't believe how vastly dully mindbogglingly boring it is. I mean you may think it's a boring walk down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to this movie. Listen ... " and so on.
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the fact that the fabulously beautiful writing of Douglas Adams is now so torn apart by the cumulative erosion of ten billion Disney hacks that any net imbalance between the amount you roll your eyes and the amount you laugh whilst watching the movie is surgically removed from your soul when you leave: so every time you watch the film it is vitally important to reread the novels afterward.)
To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of the distances between the movie's funny bits, better minds than the one responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered. Some invite you to consider for a moment a child chuckling in Reading and a man nodding knowingly in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts.
The simple truth is that these distances will not fit into the human imagination.
That's pretty much the way of it. I exaggerate for effect, of course, but this was a terribly disappointing and all-in-all really quite not particularly good at all movie.
I'd heard some advance chatter about Mos Def bringing zest to the role of Ford Prefect. He did, to some extent, but mostly only in relation to the rest of the cast, all of whom terribly over-acted—with the exception of Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, who terribly under-acted, to the point of not really doing much of anything at all.
The "plot" such as it was deviated almost entirely from the book, which would have been forgivable if it made any sense; instead, we're subjected to a long, pointless side journey before the protagonists eventually make it to Magrathea, which they do for no apparent reason that I could see. And somehow even worse than the many unfunny parts that weren't part of the book where the funny, witty parts of the book that were utterly transformed into remarkably dull parts of the movie.
I AM NOW TOTALLY GOING TO POST SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION, so don't read the comments if you don't want to be spoiled. Duh.
But to sum up: just go buy the old BBC mini-series on DVD. It may be 23 years old, and it may have been produced on a tiny budget, but it's far superior.
posted by M. Jake @ 8:50 PM
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