HHGTTG - Don't Panic?

[angelophile]

A bit of a mis mash of a movie, it's hard not to feel a little disappointed by the adaptation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's not bad. In parts it's very very good indeed. And in other parts it's mind numbingly slow and goes nowhere.

There's a lot to like about the movie - the casting is superb, with every single person suiting their parts quite magnificently, even Mos Def who a lot of people have complained about. He doesn't have a lot to do, but what he does, he does well. Martin Freeman is a likable and suitably bewildered Arthur, Trillian's cute and funny, Zaphod is immensely annoying just as he should be and Alan Rickman steals the show whenever he gets a line as Marvin, the paranoid android. Bill Nighy's different, slightly more befuddled, slightly more rock n roll take on Slartibartfast is inoffensive.

Then there's a host of cameos, be it Helen Mirren as Deep Thought, The League of Gentlemen as various Vogons, the original Arthur - Simon Jones, Richard Griffith as Jeltz, Bill Bailey as the whale, Kelly MacDonald, John Malkovitz and the TV show's Marvin robot popping up. They even use the original theme tune, in parts and it's moments like that the whole movie feels wonderfully right.

Stephen Fry replaces the late Peter Jones with aplomb and class as the voice of the guide itself and his narration links are one of the highlights of the movie.

Then there's the visuals. This movie looks GORGEOUS. Jim Henson's Creature Workships deigns for the alien creatures are wonderful - the Vogons looking especuially superb, although I'm still no fan of Marvin's new design. But the spacecraft, the destruction of the Earth but most especially the tour of Earth MK II are stunning. The shop floor tour of the custom built planets is just jaw droppingly amazing.

The new romance between Arthur and Trillian is actually quite charming, and although his final declaration of love feels a bit shoehorned in it's hard to think anything but lovely fluffy thoughts when the radiant Zooey Deschanel is on screen being gorgeous.

Touchingly, the very final image of the movie is is the late Douglas Adams' smiling face. I got a bit choked up at that point, I admit it, especially as that faded to be replaced with the words FOR DOUGLAS. And I can't help but feel this is a film Adams would have liked and been proud of.

Now come the problems, which balance out the goodrather too neatly. There's a fair bit of new material and a lot of it, particularly that featuring John Malkovich goes absolutely nowhere and doesn't really add much to the film. It feels like the dangling thread of an abandoned storyline that Adams started witing and probably would have abandoned down the line as he had a habit of doing. The additional rescue plot on the Vogsphere fits into the plot more neatly, but serves little purpose. There are some real belly laughs to be had from the slapstick in this section, but transpose those to Magrathea and it would actually have suited the movie much more neatly.

Then there's the problem that some coherence has been sacrificed in pursuit of pace. Some things that I understood may not have been instantly apparent to a viewer new to this world. For example, we never find out why the pan-dimensional beings want Arthur's brain, the sections with Deep Thought are horribly truncated so we never know all about the question to which the answer is 42, or how the Earth fits into it. Never is it stated "the Earth was built as an organic supercomputer to calculate the question of life, the universe and everything." Earth's relevence is very nearly explained and then, presumably for dramatic effect, it's cut off and never explained fully. Neither is Zaphod's reason for being so dead set against Malkovich's character.

But the main problem with the movie is it's just too plot centric. The plot of the TV show, books and radio shows was an organic thing and, frankly, the plot was always very slight. A lot of the plot just ISN'T FUNNY, but the joys were Adams's pleasure in twisting language into all sorts of new and amusing shapes - "Vogan constructor ships hang in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't." Much of that delightful wordplay is lost here, and some of the Guide entries are truncated so that they provide information but not laughs, but I suppose that was inevitable. But Douglas Adams was a dialogue writer. That was his skill - writing great dialogue. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good comedy writing is like poetry, until the whole thing sung. The original scripts and books had lines that sung, that were just perfect in their conception. It has a meter to it and when you get the right words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will do. Douglas’ dialogue was perfect.

However, the makers of this film have seen fit to piss about with his carefully crafted, wonderfully quotable lines. To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. In a very literal sense they have removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, then the expected punline never comes... No "Last Orders gentlemen!" or "No, I only write poetry to throw my mean, callous exterior into some form of self relief.". There are even jokes where we get the feed-line but not the actual punchline. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with lines that just fall flat where the originals leapt from the page and beat you around the head with slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

That's in the dialogue itself, but the movie really suffers where the guide come into play. Franly, in the movie, it rarely does. There's about five or six guide sections in the whole movie when there should have been twenty. that's where the humour is. And the guide sections themselves sound wonderful coming in Stephen Fry's ligubrious tones, but look like 1960s in-flight safety manuals. Not sure what look they were going for and other people have liked them, but for me the original TV show had graphics that were more appealing and since they were hand animated and the movie has the benefit of many millions of dollars of technology behind it, it's disappointing.

The other problem is the movie just sort of ends. Every other version has a sort of pay off, with Ford and Arthur trapped on prehistoric earth, but I'm not sure whether the movie was attempting to set up for a sequel or not. If just sort of... ends.

There's a lot to like about the movie, for all that. It's just there's plenty more to like that's missing and much of it is funny enough it's sorely missed.

Just not as funny as it should have been.