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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 6.59%
Worth A Look: 33.52%
Average: 25.82%
Pretty Bad: 12.64%
Total Crap: 21.43%
13 reviews, 104 user ratings
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| Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The |
by Lybarger
"You won’t panic, but you should be laughing harder."
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At the screening I attended for the new Touchstone Pictures version of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” it was easy to the spot the diehard fans of the original BBC radio series and novels. They emerged from the theaters sulking like Marvin the Robot.As someone who has only viewed a single episode of the 1981 TV miniseries, I can’t say I felt the same sense of dejection. To someone who is unfamiliar with Douglas’ writings, the film offers sporadic, mild amusements but isn’t likely to inspire the rabid devotion the books have aroused.
‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is unique in that it features lots of entertaining asides that are more fun than the core story. Whenever you hear British actor Stephen Fry’s narration, be prepared to chuckle. His wonderfully dry, detached delivery is accompanied by some nifty animated silhouettes.
Once Fry shuts up, the film’s wit emerges fitfully. Martin Freeman, who’s best known as the harried Tim from ‘The Office,’ stars as Arthur Dent, a Englishman who’s a little glum because his home is about to be bulldozed for a freeway.
He soon discovers this is the least of his troubles when his best friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) announces that the planet is about to be destroyed to make room for an overpass for spaceships and that he hitchhikes his way across the galaxy (so, the American accent isn’t the only sign he’s from somewhere else?).
They wind up having to dodge the overbearing bureaucrats called Vogons. They get some assistance from the two headed president of the galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell, resembling a bassist laid off from a Lynard Skynard tribute band) and the Earthgirl Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), who once had a thing for Arthur. They also get some nominal help from a dreary robot named Marvin (perfectly voiced by Alan Rickman). This machine is such a whiner that he makes Woody Allen seem cheerful.
The once thing that I remember from seeing the TV series is that it amused despite its 50 pound special effects budget. Marvin’s bellyaching was so funny that it didn’t matter if the production looked a little bit below that of a high school drama production.
Rookie feature director (and former music video specialist) Garth Jennings, on the other hand, has certainly paid a lot of attention to production design and the creatures (the Jim Henson-created Vogons are impressively icky). But the story’s loose progression bogs down, and the cast has little to do. It seems silly to cast John Malkovich as a high priest of sneezing if all he’s asked to do is play second fiddle to superimposed centipede legs. Marvin’s round head may have no expressions, but he has a more well-developed personality than just about any of the humans.
Before he died in 2001, Adams wrote various drafts of the script (Kerry Kirkpatrick of “Chicken Run” fame completed it), and his ideas are still retained but oddly selected. Some newer gags Douglas conceived (like an orange juicer-shaped device that temporarily makes the dim Zaphod intelligent) aren’t that good. Adams’ free flowing approach probably worked better in print and didn’t require the elaborate convoluted treatment it receives here.
For outsiders like myself, it would have been nice to have a firmer idea of why towels are so important in this milieu and why Zaphod has two heads. The explanations offered don’t quite work.The pairing of a huge Hollywood production with the droll British delivery is awkward. It’s like Michael Bay interpreting Pinter.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11932&reviewer=382
originally posted: 05/01/05 15:07:14
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USA
29-Apr-2005 (PG-13)
DVD: 13-Sep-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
28-Apr-2005
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