The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[Mike Carroll]

Yay! Me and my good lady have just returned from a special screening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

I won't spoil it for anyone, but I will say that it wasn't a bad movie at all. It deviates a lot from the other versions, but then they deviate from each other anyway.

Worth seeing, whether you're a fan or not.

Anyone else seen it yet?

Mike C

P.S. It's my wife Leonia's birthday tomorrow.

[Max Kon]

You're married? Wow! :P

Give her my best

[petemaskreplica]

Well, having spent a long time typing a load of rambling shite about this film on another thread, I might as well paste it here :)

I went with the expectation that it'd be moderately entertaining, but not a patch on the book, and I got pretty much what I expected. Hard to see how it could be better? maybe, but it's also easy to see why it isn't any better.

It's very disjointed. Well of course it is, so's the source material. The difference is that making it up as you go along while producing a ground-breaking radio serial in the late 70's leads to a fun, free-wheeling ride, it just seems bitty and directionless when you're adapting a 25 year old radio series for a Hollywood movie. So we get lots of re-jigged versions of favourite skits which don't work quite as well as they did on Radio 4 in 1978. Although that's true of the books, too. The opening sequence in particular feels heavily over-edited and rushed, but maybe that's just because I'm over-familiar with the original. Radio monologues wouldn't work on film, and it'd be stupid to try.

That's a lot of the problem really - this film seems caught between trying to please the fans, and trying to reinvent the material as a decent movie. So we get a semblance of a plot attempting to tie together lots of sketches, combined with a frenetic pace trying to hid the holes in the plot, and it doesn't really gel.

Of course, another problem is that I first heard most of the jokes 25 years ago, so they can't possibly seem fresh, and the fact that I did chuckle a bit says a lot for their enduring quality.

There are some fan-pleasing moments - Simon Jones has a cameo, and the funniest line in the film, and the TV Marvin turns up in the background at one point. But that just serves to point up how the design of the new Marvin misses the point - it's clearly come from the train of thought: "Hey! He's got a brain the size of a planet, and he's depressed! Let's give him a downcast posture and a big round head!" the TV Marvin on the other hand, with its ghastly rictus grin, actually looks like something that might come from the sort of "creative" minds that also thought a good marketing slogan would be "Your plastic pal who's fun to be with".

I actually quite like the way they've done Zaphod's head. But it seems pedantic and unnecessary to try and explain WHY he has two heads. And having established that he has a third arm, they seem to completely forget about it for the rest of the film. What they should have done of course is not bother giving him two heads and three arms - that's one throwaway line in a radio show, for chrissakes - but they couldn't dare do that, what would the fans say? This is a film that's overwhelmingly scared of itself - it doesn't want to offend diehard fans, it doesn't want to alienate any potential new audience, and it ends up pleasing neither camp fully.

I'm being over negative perhaps - there are plenty of nice bits, the tour of the Magrathean workshop's well done, the Point Of View Gun's a fun idea, the cast are good, the effects are pretty good. Overall it's definitely a curates egg, good in parts. I liked the dolphin song at the start, the animations that accompany the Book monologues are fun, the Book's there but they sensibly don't push it to the forefront - it' a concept that seemed wild and exotic in 1978, but it's barely short of mundane reality now. And the ending has some funny stuff with Vogons and Marvin before it descends into sickly sentimentality.

So, it diverted me for a couple of hours, I chuckled a bit, laughed out loud at least twice, like I say it was as good as I thought it would be, no more, no less. It's not nearly as good as the radio version, but let's be honest, neither are the books or the TV series. And it had me (albeit with a hundred or so other people) singing in it for about 30 seconds, which is as close to movie stardom as I'm likely to get :)

Not great, not a disaster, just a run of the mill sci fi comedy, really. If they'd made it in 1980 it would probably have seemed a lot more special, but hey, that's life. And it's back on the radio next week, I'm looking forward to seeing if that can make "So Long And thanks For All The Fish" seem any good ;)

[Richmond Clements]

Hey Mike, tell Leonia 'Happy birthday' from me and Angela, and we'll see you in October.

[judge dreddd]

the tv version was so good i dont see why they even tried

[The Monarch]

So long and thanks for all the fish...I should hate the song but i don't

As said above its not a patch on the book but hey what is?

[johnnystress]

Havent seen it yet but I have just watched the Vote Beeblebrox video- and now I cant get that damn song out of my head  >:(

[Mr C]

The singings's in it?
Oddboy and Tanky are stars!

[GordonR]

Saw it tonight.  Didn't laugh once.  

It was twenty minutes into it - and those were looooong minutes - before I remembered why I haven't read Douglas Adams' work since I was 14.

Because I don't think he's very funny.  There.  I've said it.  The heresy is uttered.

Gets a bit better towards the end.  A bit better.  Not much.

[Byron Virgo]

Not surprised you didn't laugh if you didn't think it was funny to begin with.

Suyrprised you'd go to see something you didn't really have an interest in - did you have a child who wanted to be taken to see it?

[GordonR]

No, I was actually looking forward to it, and thought the trailers looked encouraging.

I had virtually forgotten what the original books/radio series were like.  It all came horribly flooding back once the film got going, and I had a sudden sinking realisation about why I hadn't read those books again in almost 25 years.

So, to me at least, the film captures most of the spirit of the original formats - ie. twee, parochial and sometimes just embarrassingly juvenile.  (The Vogon poetry stuff still makes me cringe, just like it did 20 years ago.)

I didn't seem to be alone.  The cinema was pretty busy, and there were hardly any laughs from the audience.  My kids were a bit non-plussed by it, and they had really been looking forward to it.

[Byron Virgo]

I thought there had to be kids involved.

Still, it's one of those things that cuts one way or the other: you either love it or hate it with equal measure. Funnily enough, the Americans really love that slightly parochially eccentric, seemingly exclusive British humour (witness the success of Hitch Hiker's books over there, or Beyond the Fringe).

[opaque]

I haven't seen it yet and hope I get to soon.

But about Marvin and his downcast posture. Imagine Marvin upright with a giant smile, then he'd look like your plastic pal whose fun to be with, it's Marvin himself that makes himself look bad, which is how he feels.
That's how I could see it ;)

[GordonR]

The Marvin from the TV series makes a cameo appearance in the movie.  As, weirdly, does Douglas Adams.

[Bico]

I thought the new Marvin looked too cute, the trailer was too slapstick-oriented (not a good sign with such verbose source material), and the film looked like just the kind of thing that the shellsuit-wearing c*nts in this town will flock to see, then spend the whole movie chattering like chimps.

Despite that, I'm still off to see the matinee on saturday, safe in the knowledge that I believe so fervently that this will be utterly shite that I might end up enjoying it because nothing could be as bad as I expect this film to be.
I'm not even joking - somehow, I ended up watching Batman and Robin and The Saint in the cinema, even after the critical pasting they got - and ended up enjoying them both.
No, really.