I finally got around to seeing the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film on Sunday. I went in with low expectations, a result of the various 'net reviews by fans who found it awful and all the middling reviews by media folk. But I also went in knowing that it probably wouldn't totally suck. Which was about right.
I find it interesting that being a fan of previous incarnations of the story works against you, but being a non-fan doesn't work for you either. For instance, they never explained why Ford always insisted upon having his towel with him, which fans would get, but no one else would. (As a side note, I did love his bizarre ululating when he would attack someone. How wonderfully odd.) But then there were so many jokes that were straight-out repeated from the radio show that it was boring, really, for big fans. Everyone kept telling me to "stay through the credits!" I did, only to be treated to a word-for-word bit from the radio show. Whoop-de-doo.
I don't know how to feel about the whole "book fan" thing.
Lord of the Rings fans can be some of the most obnoxious people on the planet when it comes to critiquing the movies. Here they are, given some of the best movies based on books in recent memory, very faithful when it would have been easy to downright molest the source material, and all they can do is bitch about how they left out the whole "Gordor the Munificent" section. You won't catch me saying that. In the end, there just weren't
enough changes, if you ask me.
So who was the movie for? Fans of the book would be bored by the repeated jokes, while non-fans would be left in the dark. That's a challenge for any adaptation, and unfortunately, I don't think they hit the balance here.
I think it was William (
Princess Bride/All the President's Men/Butch Cassidy) Goldman who said that you can't really adapt a book to film. There's too much material. You have to pare things down to about short story length to make it practical. So as far as storyline goes, I think all involved did an admirable job.
But, really, HHG has never really been about the plot, so this was the wrong thing to nail. In paring things down, they wound up going too far. The density of the original material was gone. In the books and the radio show (and, probably, the TV show, which I haven't watched in ages in spite of owning it on DVD), and -- hell -- the video game, too, the sheer density of the verbiage is much higher. The jokes come on so many levels: the slapsticky, the high-brow, the self-referential, the societal satire... You have to read/watch/listen to them several times to catch everything, which lends the experience to multiple revisits. Hell, I still listen to an episode or two of the radio show at least monthly on my iTunes. But this film is so laid back that it doesn't feel like a true Douglas Adams work. The density is off. And that's too bad. HHG has had a remarkably high hit rate up until now when you think about it.
And the first book never had the greatest plot to begin with, what little plot it had. In paring things down like they did, you're left with the weakest element of the whole enterprise, the plot, because Adams only used plot as a vehicle to tell more jokes. His writing always veered from gag to gag instead of plot point to plot point, and without directors who understood that, the result is bound to be disappointing.
We're also left with a serious case of "first movie blues," where you have to spend so much time setting everything and everyone up that things wind up feeling like an exercise in exposition, which, oddly enough, was always one of Adams' specialties. He could make exposition brilliant. (Big-screen comic book adaptations are notorious for having slow, middling first films, because of all the piddling around with origin stories. Only in the second film can they dump that baggage and really cut loose.) So the end of the film is wide open for a fine second film. Too bad Adams isn't around to write the script (or anything, for that matter). Then again, I doubt very much that a second film will ever get made.
What they got right, though, is still quite impressive. The visuals were fairly amazing. The Guide looked and sounded just like it should (although there were too few entries, if you ask me). The Vogons, their fleet, and the Vogsphere were perfect. The Heart of Gold looked great. I even liked the creative solution to the whole second head/third arm bit. Marvin was fabulous. The casting was great. Everyone looked the part, I thought, even Mos Def.
The love story that everyone rightly says feels shoe-horned in could have used some work. Okay, a lot. In previous adaptations, Arthur always came off as being slightly disinterested but horny. And here he's madly in love, even though the two of them only have about two real moments alone. So that side of things never really has a chance to take on any emotional honesty. (Although, to be fair, it's hard to
not fall in love with Zooey Deschanel...)
In all fairness, what we got was really a kids movie. It was simple, broad, and not particularly deep. I think we can lay the results here, mixed as they are, at the feet of Disney and the directors. I think there was most likely a push to simplify things, to make it more commercial, more "accessible," and the directors, being first-timers, didn't have the clout or the desire to push back. HHG needs to feel manic and overstuffed and this just wasn't.
All in all, it's a very mixed bag, which is sad, but not too sad. Film isn't a writer's medium anyway. So maybe the upshot of all this will be that more people will go back to the source material(s) and experience Adams in his unfiltered glory.
In the end, the film's failure to hit the right tone isn't much of a surprise. That we got a halfway decent film is.
