Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

[Lifino]

Wow that trailer looked cool! April is just a few weeks away... I'm surprised I haven't seen any ads outside of the internet...

[Rocket Sheep]

April where? We'll be lucky to see it before August down here.

[Lifino]

The site Hrdina linked to, RS, said something like April 29 2005 right under the trailer. That's like right around the corner. As to when it hits your shores, I couldn't say.

[BlackCauldron]

I managed to avoid reading the books even though everyone told me they were great, but after not knowing anything about this, I'm now really, really intrigued. The trailer makes the movie look really funny, I'm thinking this is maybe worth seeing in the theaters?

[Hobbit]

*BUMP*

One point that made me laugh. Hitchhiker was the Number 1 film in the UK last weekend (and I think the US too?).

It's box office returns? 4.2 million pounds.

Douglas Adams would've laughed his socks off - or dropped his towel.

Hobbit

[Leiali]

I noticed that too Hobbit! I watched it over the weekend and can't say that I thought it was all that good. The books were great and I've only heard parts of the radio play but it seems to have more oomph or pazzazz than the film did. I did get pretty annoyed with some of the um....how to put this delicately? I wished all the actors were British because it is an undeniably English story, so I was disappointed with Zaphod and Ford Prefect. And it just wasn't all that funny. I think it was a reasonable effort, but since the books and radio play are absolute brilliance, that is not saying much

[Hobbit]

To be honest, I've think you've summed up my feelings there Leiali. I was around for the original radio series (a long time ago now!) and that still holds a special place. (It was a radio series before a book, did you know that?)

There are fans who are much more into it than me who like the film, though, and it did use a script rewritten by Adams for the cinema.

So, hmmm.

The bits I've seen look OK, but with Batman, Sith etc on the way, I'm off to see Kingdom of Heaven rather than this one and save my money for the others. I'll probably see it on DVD when it comes out.

Hobbit

[KatG]

Not only was it a radio play, but they did a miniseries of it for British t.v. long time back. But nostalgia for Dr. Who-ish fun aside, the movie did give them a chance to do full-out special effects and they took it. I went with my husband and kid. I had been expecting them to be a bit more slapstick about it, which is why I thought my daughter might like it. She did enjoy it, but they were exceedingly faithful to the book, including producing whole diagram and overvoice sections of the Guide itself, and so it wasn't as physical a comedy as some might expect. Not that they didn't have a lot of physical humor, but they also had a lot of very British verbal humor that I loved but went over her 9 year old head a fair amount. They had the whale for which I bless them. They got in all the really important jokes with aplomb and a couple I didn't expect they'd bother with like the one with the paper bags. And they had a beautiful time with the planet making workshop which I would say was my favorite part. And the Vogons, who I always had trouble visualizing from the books, were a great deal of fun.

Leiali -- Yes, they had American actors in some of the key roles, but they also had the critical voices of Alan Rickman as Marvin the robot and Stephen Fry as the narrator of the Guide, and an array of fine British actors and it was very much a U.K. production, not the way an American outfit would have done it at all. (You'd have never have gotten the whale in a U.S. film.) Mo Def and Sam Rockwell were hysterical and their being not very British played up Arthur Dent's British-ness even more. When Ford asks if Arthur didn't notice that his British accent was odd, it got a large laugh. I wouldn't have minded seeing a British actress play Trillian, but Zoey Deschanel did do a good job.

All in all, I'd say that it isn't as manic as previous productions have been or as some might expect, but it was very loving and sweet and silly, and I think Adams would have been happy with it. It has all that wonderful sense of wonder, hope and exasperation that he designed. And visually, it's quite beautiful and creative. Plus, the towels were nice.

[Hobbit]

And I guess HERE's the counterview. For the record, MJ Simpson is one of (if not THE) UK's experts on Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker. He wrote a biography and has done much over the years to keep an interest in Mr Adams's works.

I guess that might mean that he would find it difficult to like.

(Quick summary of his review: last paragraph or so

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is an abomination. Whereas the radio show, TV show, books and computer game are all recognisably variations on a theme, this is something new and almost entirely unrelated. It’s not even a good film if viewed as an original work: the characters are unsympathetic, the cast exhibit no chemistry, the direction is pedestrian, the pace plodding, the special effects overpowering (lots and lots of special effects, none of them funny mind you) and above all the script is amazingly, mindbogglingly awful. Oh, and they have taken most of the jokes out.

This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep.

(Oh and if you really really want to pull the film apart, try the link to the 4 page review!)

Hobbit

[Hereford Eye]

Saw it yesterday. Not the finest film I've ever seen - but on its own merits - not the worst. Enjoyed the cartooning of the Guide's explanations for things. Dent was well cast as everyman; I liked Trillian but her early scenes were trying too hard; Zaphod was hard to take; and For Prefect had his moments. Came out of the movie surprizingly nuetral about the whole thing.

[Leiali]

I watched the TV series when it came out I think, and heard parts of the radio play over the years on Radio 4, so I think I kind of absorbed it even before I read it. But this was mostly years ago, and so I had a fresh mind when I went to see the film, and was disappointed because it just wasn't all that funny. The two scenes I really enjoyed were the dolphins and the world making - everything else was mediocre in my opinion. I wouldn't be quite so harsh as the reviewer Hobbit quotes here, but I really disagree with KatG. The film would not have worked at all without Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry and it only used their voices. I can't stand slap stick comedy, give me sharp, funny verbal comedy any day, and this just didn't deliver. More disappointing than dire, but not good none the less.

[KatG]

Well, I think you guys are entirely entitled to your opinions on it, but I think MJ Simpson is being a little unrealistic.

-- He complains that there is too much slapstick humor and physical comedy, but I was surprised about how little slapstick they actually went for, as I said, and where there was slapstick, it got some of the biggest laughs, because well, film is a visual medium.

-- He complains that Arthur is now an annoying prat, but in the book, Arthur is an annoying prat and in the television version, he was also an annoying prat. He claims Ford has lost his party spirit, but it is clearly visible in the movie, in my opinion. They did change Zaphod a bit, particularly the second head, but that was because two headed aliens have been done to death in other movies, and the essence of the character appears to me to be exactly what it was in the book. The squabbling between Trillian, Zaphod and Arthur sounded entirely accurate.

-- He claims there were too many special effects, but that seems to be a part of what other folk liked and is one of the few advantages a movie version now can offer -- that the things Adams described, like a sperm whale falling through space, could be brought to life. I'm frankly at a loss to see how you could do a Hitchhiker's movie without a fair amount of special effects, given all that Adams put into it. (Notice I say movie, not play, radio play, etc.)

-- He seems to want them to have put every entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide that's in the book into the movie. This is utterly impossible. If the movie stopped every few minutes to give long if comical explanations and descriptions of everything in the movie, it wouldn't work. It would just be Stephen Fry talking for hours with little diagrams and the film would have no momentum at all. I was amazed that they did the Guide entries the way that they did, actually. When the first cartoon diagram, as if from the Guide, came on the screen, I thought, well now that's a big risk. But it worked pretty well. But if they'd done it and the overvoice constantly, the device wouldn't have worked, it would have gotten tired and people would be bored because it would be like listening to the audio version of the book with some line drawings. You have to let the characters run around sometimes.

-- He's upset that they didn't use or cut numerous characters, dialogue scenes and digressions like exploring various planets and that they streamlined the main plot. Well, yeah, again, it's a movie. Maybe they made the wrong choices sometimes, I don't know, but what Simpson demands, the scope of it, is not workable, IMO.

-- He claims that Adams' name is absent from all publicity for the film. I don't know if that's the case in Britain, but over here, every review and article on the film talks mainly about Adams and his work.

-- He doesn't like the addition of a character who Adams created specifically for the movie. He has a point about that sub-plot, though I suspect they're hoping to use it for a sequel if things go well, and Adams' death may have meant they weren't sure how to develop it, but because he created it, they used it.

-- He says that the Swiftian satire has been eliminated from the movie. This is incorrect. The film in fact hammers at the comparison between Vogon and Earth bureaucracy, on planet-making being like any other construction business, the importance of saving the environment -- Adams' pet cause, and other connections. It doesn't do every bit of satire in the book, and it doesn't spend oodles of time on any one subject, but that's not necessarily a detriment to my mind.

In the long review, which I glanced at, he nitpicks his way through every scene, upset that they didn't do longer dialogue exchanges and explain this detail and that detail, that they only did transformations on the improbability drive so that just makes it awful. He claims that all this makes everything automatically not funny. I'm afraid I'd have to disagree with him. He makes a good point or two on things where they might have smoothed it up. He complains a few things aren't in the movie that appear to have been added to the theatrical release. He makes a good point that there was a 2 hour play that would have been useful, but seems to ignore the fact that there is a big difference between what you need to do for a movie story and a play. He doesn't like the product placement, well duh. Mostly he seems to dislike that his friend is dead and so did not write every line in the movie or have every line he wrote put in. He points out that Adams didn't plot comprehensible stories all that well, but seems to feel that the movie should therefore have ignored the issue of a comprehensible plot altogether in favor of long conversations between the characters.

I think they did a decent job, and I would hope that Adams' fans, and close associates, would fume a little less and be more supportive, given how infrequently the film industry is willing to do a big budget sf movie based on any writer besides Phillip K. Dick. Much less a comic sf writer who wrote dear but incredibly quirky material. It's been a lot of years since Adams was publishing, there are a lot of people who have never heard of him, and this movie will help bring new attention to his books. It has his heart in it and I don't feel, as Simpson seems to, that it is absent of his wit. For me, it was fun.

[Merancapeman]

I'm a better reviewer then MJ will ever be, the little snot rag... KAtG, YOU GO!



*Spoiler*- Just in case you haven't seen it-

I have to admit, it is a little far from the book, but there wasn't a real.... plot to be able to work with. Adams created the villians and the extra characters to make the plot possible, as well as the "POV Gun". (I believe Adams also created the main song, and I thought it was perfect and funny... If that song wasn't even relatively linked to that book, I would have thought it was very childish. I knew it was Adam's)

Two things I didn't like was 1. the love triangle, including Arthur and Trillian. It was silly to put that in, and I totally agreed with the mice when they said "We don't care about 'the one'!". 2. Why was Zaphod such a dimwit? Arthur was the stupid one, wasn't he? Oh well....

All in all, I still loved the movie. They left it open for a sequel too. I hope they get to the resturant at the end of the universe!

[KatG]

Well, I don't mean to make him sound like a jerk. He obviously cares very much about the film and Adams' work and I don't feel that he's totally off-base. But I can't agree with him.

For instance, when Prosserman asks Arthur if he's seen the plans for the by-pass, Arthur replies that he had to find them in the cellar, and the audience I was with laughed loudly at that, as they did when the Vogon official repeats Prosserman before blowing up the Earth. Simpson complains that they left off the continuation of the conversation between Prosserman and Arthur, where it gets progressively sillier, about how it's in the dark, there's a sign warning against dangerous animals, etc., and that is delightfully funny, but Simpson claims if you don't have that entire rift, there's no joke to laugh at. But he's wrong, it was funny, the audience got it, and they could move on much faster. Simpson also claims that they were wrong to drop the next, complicated if funny scene of Ford talking Prosserman into lying down in the mud and instead substitute Ford delivering a cart of laeger and peanuts to distract the construction crew. But that also got an enormous laugh from the audience I was with, worked just as well and takes a lot less time. The pay-off for the film is to get the Earth blown up and Arthur into space and they can't take an hour to do it.

I mean, I know it's hard when your favorite rifts or even scenes get excluded but even with a short book, it's rather hard to avoid. And they do have to leave some room for the special effects. They can't make a 90 million stage play cult movie where everything's left to the viewer's imagination. And they don't need to describe and explain everything in Adam's words when they can just show things to us visually.

I'm probably being too hard on him, and it has been a long time since I read the book, so maybe I'm deluded and the film is awful butchery, but it just seems like an overreaction to me, borne out of grief mostly. But then, I've stopped reading film reviews except to skim them for story details because it seems to me that most of them really dislike movies altogether. They want the teen slasher films to be innovative and less exploitive of women and the trash commedies to be less juvenile. If the film is sufficiently noir, violent and uses cool camera tricks, they sometimes like it, but otherwise, they usually declare it to be a sign that the end is near and explain how the movie should have been done.

This is turning into a rant, isn't it? Anyway, I thought the movie was fun and I'm up for a sequel too.

[Hereford Eye]

It was a rant well taken.