Slashdot Mirror
Hitchhikers Movie Update
DaViking writes "Over at Yahoo Movies there are a few more pictures, including one of the Heart of Gold, and an updated trailer for up coming Hitchhikers movie." I'm hoping this film will inspire some sequels, too!
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Whatever happened to a "space age running shoe sleekness"?
:D
However, on a positive note, that spacecraft does look like it's from a Douglas Adams novel
-- n
"Marvin the depressed robot"? WTF? He's Marvin the Paranoid Android. I know he is a robot who is depressed, but sheesh he is, was, and always will be the paranoid android.
If they can't even get that right... let's hope its just the phone sanitizers at Yahoo who made the mistake and not the movie's writer(s).
Sailing over the event horizon
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>it was never designed to be a film
the fact Douglas Adams himself worked on a version of the script seems to suggest otherwise.
I love HHGTTG and probably will go see it just for that, but it looks like Disney is tring to make it into a kids movie. Just look at Marvin. (Mod me down if you want) but it saddens me that Disney is making this movie. I fear that they might try to "clean" up the movie.
Oh I believe the execs at Disney are quite clueful. They know their target audience very well and no, it's not us. It's the "American public" who voted for Bush twice... Don't be surprised if the movie turns into a 20-minute spaceship chase and ends with Arthur and Ford preventing a major terrorist attack with a surprisingly one-sided shootout where they kill 200 clumsy Arabs without breaking a sweat.
Ok, repeat after me. It is a mass media oriented movie adaptation of a non visual original that appealed only to a niche market.
Changes will have to be made in order to make it marketable and profitable. Kids will want to see it, and they will not understand the humour, so they will need cutesy characters. Many non intelectual types will expect more explosions and COOL effects than required so they will be there. The ships will be of a more recognizable shape so that the average moviegoer doen't say "A sneaker! This is lame". And so on...
If I don't get another Battlefield Earth I will be more than happy with the movie. And only if it makes a profit we will get a sequel.
Cheers, Adolfo
How can it be "wrong"? If that's what it looks like in the movie, then it is absolutely not wrong.
To be more precise, the movie is not the book. The book is not the radio play. The radio play is not the tv series. And the tv series is most definitely not the Infocom text adventure game.
If I recall correctly, in the radio play and tv series, the characters went to Milliways before they got to Magrathea. In the books, Milliways happened in the second book, with Magrathea happening in the first. Definite contradiction there. In the books, Trillian is clearly described as being brunette and extremely intelligent. In the tv series she was a dumb ditzy blonde. In the movie, Ford Prefect is black. In the tv series, he was white.
Douglas Adams always changed things up when the story went from one medium to another. There is no right or wrong in telling the H2G2 story. The story simply is whatever it is in whatever medium you happen to be experiencing it in. In this medium, the Heart of Gold is a ball. In the book, it was a shoe. If you want the shoe version, read the book. But this isn't the book, it's the movie, and it will differ, even contradict, the other versions -- which, by the way, frequently contradict each other already. This is nothing new. It's the way it has always been in the universe of H2G2.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
The crucial difference is that when Adams introduced anything new, he went to extraordinary lengths to make sure it was just right and, crucially, extremely funny. We know that he went through countless revisions of all his work, attempting to get it "just so".
Now we've got some unknown twit messing with the details for no good reason. If I wanted to see the musings of this nobody, I would have bought their books instead.
Changing the details from those established by the original author just for the hell of it is WRONG, especially when the original author isn't able to protest.
How would the LOTR movies have fared if they'd just decided to, oh I don't know, make all the hobbits 7 feet tall, say? Just for the hell of it? How many very pissed off people would that have resulted in?