The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was one of those movies that had spent so long in Hollywood ‘development hell’ that it seemed unlikely that it would ever actually be made. Two decades of attempts by creator Douglas Adams to persuade Hollywood to make it all came to nothing, until it finally made it to the big screen in 2005, four years after Adams’ death. After all this time, there was a great deal of anticipation from fans of previous incarnations of the story, and the big question was whether the movie would be worth the wait? The answer – it was quite good, but it still should have been better after twenty years of development.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy started out as a BBC radio show in the 1970s which ventured into the rarely-explored territory of Science Fiction Comedy. From humble beginnings it quickly became a cult success and ended up being a hugely popular franchise after being converted into TV series, computer game, towel and book form. The book, written by Douglas Adams, was voted one of Britain’s five favourite novels in the BBC’s massive ‘Big Read’ survey. The radio series still has many fans (even if the books are now more famous), and even the computer game is fondly remembered. The one media frontier it didn’t successfully conquer was Film/TV. The early 1980s BBC TV series based on the Guide was reasonably entertaining, but didn’t work nearly as well as the books did, being hamstrung by a lack of budget.
The basic story centres on an ordinary man named Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman, apparently it is compulsory for movie reviews to point out that Freeman was in a show called “The Office”), a stereotypical middle-class Englishman who ends up having a very bad day. It begins with his house about to be knocked down by his local council to make way for a bypass. Arthur is understandably annoyed by this, but his predicament is put in some perspective when his friend Ford Prefect (rapper Mos Def) informs him that his entire planet is about to be demolished by a nasty race of bureaucratic aliens (the Vogons) to make way for a new Hypespace bypass. Ford knows this because he is, in fact, an alien posing as a human. Ford is a journalist working for a remarkable book/encyclopaedia/travel guide called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and is on Earth doing Field Research for a new edition of the Guide. Ford hitches a lift on a Vogon ship just before the Earth is destroyed, dragging Arthur along with him. They are then summarily thrown off the ship once the Vogons discover them, before being fortuitously rescued by the starship “Heart Of Gold”. The Heart Of Gold is the most advanced ship in the galaxy and has recently been stolen by Celebrity President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell). By an amazing coincidence, Zaphod shares the ship with the only other (human) survivor of Earth’s destruction – Tricia “Trillian” McMillan (Zooey Deschanel), an adventurous astrophysicist who Arthur happens to have a romantic interest in. They then go off on a frankly implausible journey to discover the Question that fits the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe and Everything. There are also mice, dolphins, people randomly turning into sofas, John Malkovich as a nose-worshipping religious cultist and Marvin The Paranoid Android (Alan Rickman), a highly intelligent but permanently depressed robot.
In short, it is a difficult story to summarise.
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By its very nature, the Guide is a surreal, slightly satirical and very improbable story. The film is a bit more coherent than some previous versions of the story, but it is questionable how much someone who hadn’t previously encountered the story would understand of what is going on. It does sometimes feel a bit more like a series of sketches rather than a continuous narrative, but being a comedy a compelling plot is merely a nice optional extra, the success or failure of the film is determined by how funny it is.
In the run-up to the release there were some contentious reviews released on the Internet, some of them suggesting that the Guide had been changed so much that it was no longer funny, with the best scenes ruined by script changes. To some extent, these reviews have a point. On many occasions in the film the film-makers seem to have wilfully truncated or removed some of the funniest scenes, which is generally Bad. However, they have also added many new funny scenes, some of which are highly amusing, this is Good. Oddly, I found many of the new scenes funnier than many of the original scenes that actually survived into the film. On reflection, perhaps changing large parts of the film is actually a good and necessary thing. I've read the book multiples times, seen the TV series twice and played the computer game so I'm very used to Adams' jokes. Over-familiarity murders Comedy, so if they had just repeated all the jokes from (say) the TV series I may well not have found the movie as amusing as I did.
Adams’ specialities were creating absurd comic situations that had some echoes of reality in them (the Vogons are parodies of over-officious Government bureaucrats, for example), and his finely-crafted dialogue. The absurd situations are all present and correct, but the dialogue just isn’t as good as it was in the book, with some overly-harsh editing done to some of the jokes. The best remaining dialogue is in the frequent entries from the Guide itself – musings on various subjects all illustrated with charmingly simplistic graphics and narrated perfectly by Stephen Fry.
The one area the film is clearly superior to the TV series is the special effects. The TV series had some of the worst special effects… EVER, particularly their attempt at giving Zaphod’s character his second head, which was pathetically obviously made out of papier mache. By comparison, the film’s special effects are at times genuinely impressive, particularly the stylishly simple destruction of the Earth, the bleak concrete jungle of the Vogon planet and the beautiful journey through the Margarethan planet factory. The non-humanoid aliens are impressively convincing, and there is generally little to fault with the film’s visual spectacle.
The acting is also pretty good. Martin Freeman is perfect for the simple-man-out-of-his-depth role, Zooey Deschanel is charming as his love interest and Sam Rockwell is suitably manic as Zaphod (although his character is frankly butchered compared to the book version). The show-stealer is Alan Rickman’s Marvin whose manically depressed robot is by far the funniest character in the movie, it is a pity that his character isn’t in the film a bit more.
In summary, judged on its own merits this is a fine example of science fiction comedy. It isn’t as funny as (say) Galaxy Quest, but it is still definitely worth watching. Despite its entertainment value, it is a bit of a disappointment. With some relatively small changes it could have been a lot better, and it fails to fully realise the potential of the story. I am vaguely hopeful that a Director’s Cut could make it better by restoring some of the jokes from previous versions of the story that are missing in action here, but at the moment this isn’t quite as good as I was hoping for.
Rating : 7 / 10
All content ©2007 William Marnoch.
Comments? Agree/Disagree with the Reviews? Suggestions? Random Ramblings? Whatever you might want to say, feel free to e-mail me at william@wmarnoch.freeserve.co.uk .