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Grandpa Crazy Brian mailed me a Barnes and Noble gift card last December. I finally got around to using it this last Monday. After I verified my card was limited to thirty-five bucks, I logged onto the bookstore website and ordered the DVD of Sam Peckinpah’s classic western The Wild Bunch. I also decided to take a risk and order the DVD of the new Disney production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Hey, it was a gift card, so I wasn’t spending money out of my pocket on a movie I hadn’t seen. For a long time I wanted to see a feature film of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; pretty much since I first read the Douglas Adams trilogy. For whatever reason nobody could get a movie version off the ground until after Adams died of a heart attack in 2001. Once I learned Disney finally produced the film, however, I had my doubts. The teaser trailer I saw somewhere at the beginning of this year interested me, but I felt the film would be fucked up. So I stayed away from the theatre.
Crazy_Greg and The Friend Formerly Known as Metal Hair went. CG hated it. TFFKAMH liked it. has read the books and seen the mini-series. TFFKAMH hadn’t read the books and only saw part of the mini-series in high school. I figured I’d hate it too.
But with the DVD, I could get it for cheaper than renting it. And if I didn’t like it, I could sell it on Ebay. Plus, I could use it as evidence of how not to do a movie if that’s what the DVD demonstrated. When it came in the mail yesterday I watched it. Here is my assessment, originally written for Amazon and slightly modified for grammar and HTML format here.
It sometimes surprises me people don’t believe in evolution. The forces of natural and artificial selection affect stories all the time. After all, no story can be retold without something changing somewhere.
And just because one person doesn’t find new information beneficial, doesn’t mean another person won’t find it either. I first encountered the famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an Infocom text-based adventure game. My father then introduced me to the first of ultimately five novels in the “trilogy”. Through these I learned the books derived from a BBC radio series. And at long last I bought the BBC television series on VHS and DVD.
It’s a good thing then Douglas Adams reproduced his beloved series in so many ways. The latest offspring is the long-gestated feature film from Disney affiliate Touchstone. While director Garth Jenning’s version of the first novel differs wildly from its source, the film boasts its own value.
That said, I don’t like the movie very much.
I spoke of evolution, but the film is not an adaptation so much as a Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. The filmmakers unearthed only ragged pieces of the books and the mini-series. They stitched it together with a completely different and sadly clichéd plot. The resulting monster is given life by spectacular creature effects and CGI, light-years ahead of the BBC in 1982. But that doesn’t mean I want to give it a hug.
I certainly don’t want to hug the Vogons. Yet it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film with such appealing production values. Created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, the Vogons are a cross between those creepy beetle things from The Dark Crystal and the Mangalore warrior aliens from The Fifth Element. Indeed, the puppets provide a sense of texture impossible to achieve with CGI, and however unhuggable, I’d rather be around these aliens than Jar-Jar Binks. The Vogon environment too, draws loving inspiration from Terry Gilliam’s 1984 film Brazil. Just check out the similarities between Gilliam’s Monolith City and the Vogon city of skyscraper spaceships. The extent to which the film harps upon Vogon bureaucracy also echoes Gilliam’s vision of a paperwork tyranny.
Expanded examination of these galactic bureaucrats almost redeemed this film for me. Adams never delved much into these creatures in the books, as the Vogons were mostly pawns in one of a series of intergalactic conspiracies which loosely connects the trilogy. But this conspiracy is among many other things ultimately lost in the translation from books to film. It omits all of the puzzle-plots begun in the first book, consequently deleting most of the story, deleting most of the classic scenes, and deleting most of the intelligence. The filmmakers further omit most of Adams’ social satire and characterizations. They reduce entire conversations into proverbs and one-liners.
What material remains lack their original context. Once funny jokes thus misfire. And funny scenes which also advanced the original story simply dangle as loose threads in this movie. What remains of the plot is dumbed down into the usual Hollywood romantic subplot and happy ending, being completely out of step with the rest of the Hitchhiker universe.
So are the characterizations. Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and Zaphod Beeblebrox are depicted in Jenning’s HGG as much more stupid and cowardly than their earlier counterparts. Many of the characters play for clichéd and unfunny slapstick. All characters are about as one dimensional as a cardboard caricature can get. Plus, I couldn’t understand actor Mos Def most of the time.
Speaking of cardboard, what was up with those paper-cutout computer graphics for the Hitchhiker’s Book? This film boasts some of the best CGI I’ve seen, but when it comes to computer screens it becomes South Park! I actually found the color contrasts of these Book scenes unpleasant-the overuse of yellow and pink backgrounds particularly clashed..
Not so with the remaining effects. Getting back to some positives, I think the rest of the CGI effects are some of best because they look more realistic. CGI tends to have a noticeable shimmer, not to mention a noticeable lack of depth against real objects. And CGI of living matter always looks fake. This happens here as well, but the computer generated images of non-living objects in HGG moves as if affected by physics. The scene with Zaphod using his third arm to drop ice-cubes exemplifies: his arm moves like a tentacle instead of a humanoid arm, and looks too fuzzy, but the ice cubes clink and roll around like they have mass. And in the all-generated shots the textures look pretty realistic and reflect light well.
Otherwise, it just makes me sad to think somebody could completely desiccate something I care about and then stuff it with fluff. Movie fans might say I’m just fashionably turning my nose up at entertainment, but I seriously don’t find Hollywood clichés and poorly developed characters entertaining. It’s not snobbish to feel burned out on the dumb slapstick that comes out year after year. Nor is it petulant to expect a comedy to have real wit and an engaging plot.
A movie also doesn’t have to be faithful to the letter or the spirit of a book to be good, but I wonder why this production turned out so badly in my eyes. The producers admit they brought on a second screenwriter to make the script more “coherent”, and Karey Kirkpatrick’s “improvements” might explain all the clumsy Hollywood clichés that are so unlike the stories I experienced as a kid.
Still, I always felt by the time Mostly Harmless (1992) came out, Douglas Adams was getting a bit sick of his own creation. There’s an almost apocalyptic relief to the delayed fifth novel of the trilogy, a quality reinforced by the book’s rather permanent ending. Adams never wrote in that world again; he outsourced the Starship Titanic (1997) to Terry Jones rather than write it himself. If this film really follows Adams’ last complete draft, then it represents a fresh breath of life into something he might have become rather bored with.
But that’s a fate reserved for creators. For fans, we can enjoy our pet variations to the end. If you saw the movie but have yet to read the books, take this as a warning: the trilogy is completely different from what you enjoyed on the screen. The same goes for those who read the book but have yet to see the film. Personally, I weaned myself on the books and the mini-series, and so I admit the movie is just too different and the comedy too poorly executed to readily appeal to me.
In the end it may appeal to you. And so it is one more variant which may be fit to thrive in Western pop culture environment. In the survival of the fittest stories, every mutation counts.
Now I feel the buyer’s remorse. I knew Disney would fuck up the film trying to improve and update it. But newspaper and magazine reviewers lent me the impression that the film was at least faithful to the book until the end, when a whole new character played by John Malkovich was introduced in a whole new scene. Those reviewers must have forgotten the book or lied in order to put some positive spin on the material. As I stated in the review, the film only included gutted carcasses of the book and mini-series material while substituting a time-worn Disney plot.