Author: SuperNova
Date: 7/27/03
Rating: 7.5
Movie Rating: PG
Purchase on Amazon.com
DVD
Buy this poster:
from MoviePoster.com
It all started when a man with a vision decided to do a cheesy sci-fi radio show, and it evolved into one of the greatest literary novel series of his or any other generation. It degraded into a lame TV show (that wasn't quite as bad as people say) and eventually into a movie, a movie that many said couldn't be done. That movie is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
The movie was very solid plotwise; mostly identical with what had come before it. A few extra scenes were tacked on that it could stand to do without, but they were decent on average and were mostly grounded in the areas covered in the book. The thought suppressing flyswatter creatures on Vogsphere were undoubtedly the best new addition. The rebuilding of Earth had the most "fleshing out" of the original story, but was lacking when it came to Slartibartfast's obsession over creating fjords.
It was above average on the whole, but it was worsened by the fact that they skimmed through quite a few of the scenes with high entertainment potential in order to add the new plotlines. The early scenes, such as the ones on Earth and the Vogon ship, were too short and thusly lacked important character development for Ford, condemning him to the role of a tag on secondary character throughout the latter half of the movie, as well as leaving out some explanations of the prevalent backstory (towels, "Mostly harmless", alcohol, etc.). The demonstrations of the Infinite Improbability Drive were the only other scenes that were lacking, reduced to nothing more than the ship changing into random objects and various minor oddities inside of it; a far cry from its unbridled strangeness in the story's previous incarnations. My high expectations for the drive, soundly based on the advancement of technology since the TV show, were one of the main reasons that I actually went to view the movie, leaving me slightly disappointed but in a good mood overall.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish was a better song than it was a book, having a classic Musical feel to it that is practically lost in today's movie industry. I did feel that despite being cute, it was a bit too long, an opinion rooted in the fact that I'm sick of the media's obsession with dolphins.
The characters were the second greatest disappointment of the movie. I refer primarily to Zaphod's redesign in particular; placing his second head below the first ruined its usefulness and threw off the whole versatility inherent in the concept, rendering him more buffoonish than edgy and also making him unable to drink and hold conversations about how awesome he is at the same time. [Spoiler] The fact that it was cut off [/Spoiler] does give them an opportunity to fix this flaw if they ever make a sequel. The other character inconsistencies that annoyed me were that Trillian's hair color seemed to change with every retelling of the story (although I've never heard the radio version) and that the mice seemed to be the same people who first posed the question to Deep Thought, but these in no way detracted from the quality of the movie.
Any diehard fan of the franchise should consider viewing this movie; newcomers however should avoid it before they read the first book, as the movie doesn't do a good job of establishing either the characters (except Trillian), including the two introduced in the movie, or the intricacies of the galaxy (one of the main purposes of the guide, the other being how to see it in less than 30 Altarian dollars per day).