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The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Mark's Take
01/06/2005 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
It is hard to be too harsh on a film with as many smiles as this one has. But for many of us the jokes will be just too familiar. Some of the visualizations are quite good and perhaps the best thing about this version of the oft-adapted stories of Douglas Adams. This film is a pleasant experience but a throwaway one. Buy The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in the USA - or Buy The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in the UK  Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
For me, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is getting to be like a good joke that I have heard too many times. Come to think of it, that is exactly what it is. I have heard the original radio broadcasts, read the books, heard the records, saw the TV show, played the video game, read the cereal box, saw the stage play, read the comic, and bought the beach towel. (Come to think of it, where is the beach towel?) Watching the film I had a curious sense of deja deja deja deja deja deja vu. I not only knew the gags ahead of time, I knew the plot that was coming up, and I knew the mid-film allusions to the jokes I was just about to hear.
I think I can solidly recommend the film to people who have experienced the story in at least one and not more than three of the above media. You should have experienced none of the media versions any more than three times. If this is your first experience with The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy you risk being completely lost, and if you have dragged through it too many times you risk falling asleep to the tune of gags you can recite in your sleep.
Douglas Adams's humor may not be well suited to visual media. In the radio version Adams has one throwaway joke in which Ford tells Zephod that the extra head suits him. The TV series was then obliged to put a stupid, lifeless head next to Zephod's living one and the actor had to go through the whole series like that. The new film version neatly side-steps the two-head problem. I will give it credit for that.
But it takes longer for a visual dramatic medium to establish a setting than it does on radio and this slows down the gags and eliminates some of the nice dialog. This is a much chopped-down version of the plot and the clever one-liners become leaden production numbers. One clever Adams bon mot becomes an entire Broadway-musical-style song to run under the opening credits. It is like casting an ethereal haiku in double-thick iron plating. Even in this hobbled version the brightness of the Adams humor comes through and we can occasionally pretend a bit that we are hearing these jokes for the first time. It is a pleasant if empty experience.
I should say something about the plot, though if you are not already familiar with the plot you may be a little lost in the film. (Now how do I say it without ruining the gags? Particularly because the plot is densely packed with gags.) Arthur Dent is a poor hapless nebbish who cannot get a date and whose house [gag reference deleted] because [gag reference deleted]. He then finds out from his friend Ford Prefect that aliens called Vogons are going to [gag reference deleted] because [gag reference deleted]. Before he knows what is happening he and Ford are on board a Vogon spacecraft with nowhere to go but the inky blackness of space.
The film has most of its rewards in its visuals. The vision of the Vogons as a big, lumbering, oafish race is a very nice piece of translation to the screen. A great deal of effort probably went into making the words fit their big, rubbery lips or really vice versa. But here it is a mistake in translating to the jokes to a visual medium. English words should not fit Vogon lips. The Vogons speak their own language, and the [gag reference deleted] allows the humans to hear in English. It should look to humans like a badly dubbed movie.
Scenes toward the end of the film are spectacular and there is even time for a visual nod to THINGS TO COME and another to STAR TREK. There is an extended new sequence centering on a new character named Humma Kavula and played by John Malkovich. The sequence is not really a very productive one, but Humma Kavula is a visually clever idea for a strange alien. I checked and Humma Kavula is not actually a line from the song "Bippity Boppity Boo" like I thought it was. I did, however, correctly recognize Marvin's voice as being that of Alan Rickman. But even outside of a Hitchhiker's context Rickman's voice always had a sort of Marvin quality.
It was a good casting choice even if visually Marvin was not my image of the lugubrious robot. Another good casting choice was the choice of Bill Nighy for a character who appears late in the film. Nighy has been a good character actor for years, but I think audiences saw him entirely anew after he was the best thing in the film LOVE ACTUALLY.
Seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy as a film was not the experience I was hoping for, but it kept me smiling. I rate it a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 2005 Mark R. Leeper
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