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)
They're going to make Heart of Gold into a spaceball.
Sorry, but that rendering of the Heart of Gold looks wrong. It's supposed to be shaped like a running shoe. Hmm, perhaps it is supposed to be a running shoe shaped for the foot of a superintelligent shade of the color blue.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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
Because we all know that if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
Besides, sequels are usually just as good if not better than the original.
Sorry. I'll shut up now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
there's very little to be said for artistic license. I, for one, am just happy that this is making its way into the visual realm, and relish the thought of getting to see what the disney artists concepts of adams' work end up looking like. perhaps holding one's tongue and putting judgement by the wayside until it's been released would be a pragmatic thing to do?
;)
nevermind...that's not a shoe!
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
>it was never designed to be a film
the fact Douglas Adams himself worked on a version of the script seems to suggest otherwise.
...that's a space station!
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
The shape of the ship is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a shoe.
For those who don't want to scroll through countless popups: wget http://mp3content01.bcst.yahoo.com/bus01root6/Bus0 1Share24/yahoomovies/6/8768235.mov
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.
It wasn't designed to be a book, either. It wasn't even designed to be a radio series. The first episode of it was designed to be an episode of a radio series about the world ending in different ways. Fortunately, Douglas Adams wasn't good at designing things; he was good at coming up with brilliant material. The thing about Douglas Adams is that he would turn out a lot of stuff that didn't fit together at all, and have a good editor make it into something that worked.
That's not to say that the movie will actually be done well. But HHGTTG is just about ideal for doing in different media, because it's really a set of characters and situations, not a story.
(Oh, and it's already a TV miniseries)
The film finished filming in August of 2004.
-------
Chunky Bacon
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.
Yes, like in the Hebrew cover of the book.
(BTW: Any female H2G2 fans here? I'm looking for a girlfriend!)
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
Am I the only one who has a problem with this being called a new trailer? There was actually a /. story when this teaser trailer came out about 6 months ago.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
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
I was hoping they would make one movie per novel, sort of like lord of the rings. There is so much material in the books that there shouldn't be a problem to make several movies, one per novel.
Harald
The thing about the H2G2 universe, though, is that everything changes, nothing is definite, and many things that exist in one of the versions of the story (radio, tv, book, computer game, movie, whatever) completely contradict the way things are in the other versions. That's the way Douglas Adams wanted it to be.
To quote the man himself (from A Guide To The Guide: Some unhelpful remarks from the author in the omnibus edition of the first four books in the Trilogy...
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Name one book to movie conversion that wasn't a disappointment to someone who read the book previously.
Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption were both based on Stephen King novellas. Stand By Me is an almost letter perfect adaptation of "The Body". There were some deviations in Shawshank Redemption but they were tolerable and weren't total "re-imaginings" of the essential story. The mere mention of Harry Potter does seem to shut some minds down but those movies are faithful to their source material. Come to think of it, The Andromeda Strain was also a good adaptation and a rare example of good cinematic sci-fi.
Nonethess, I agree with you. Most book to movie adaptations go beyond what is necessary to bring a detailed novel to a two hour movie. 9 times out 10, the story will be cheapened so that all the tired Hollywood cliches can be crammed into what could have been a good movie. Even worse, you have things like I Robot which have almost nothing to do with the books they come from. I Robot was originally to be called Livewire and had some character names from I Robot grafted onto it so they could rape Asimov's corpse for a few extra bucks.
Although his form is completely contradictory to the original vision, it could work. After all, I think Disney has a very intimate understanding of what "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes" would have in mind while designing a robot.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
For those who hadn't noticed yet: try reloading the http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com site a few times. (Hm... Would that be considered a Serial-Slashdotting?) There are a number of different fashions in which the earth gets obliterated -- Not sure how many there are total, but I've seen at least 7 different ones.
Before any US /.-ers mod me down for that remark on patriotic grounds (I'm not a Brit, but Aussie, btw), consider this:
The original Arthur Dent was very, very, very English - meaning that, no matter what happened, he approached it with the traditional (and much stereotyped) British "stiff upper lip".
Case in point: refer to the tale he told Fenchurch in "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" about the biscuits in the railway station.
Adams' delightfully dry humour will only translate well if Arthur maintains the original Dent nature.
And let's face it, the dialogue is the best part about HHGTTG, in all it's forms - radio program, book, TV series, LP series, stage show and (hopefully) this movie! I doesn't need to be about great special effects as long as it's funny :)
Adams himself said the TV series was his least favourite adaption, but he was happy enough at the time to keep a heap of the main actors (Jones, Jones, Wing-Davey and Moore) and my guess it was he wanted the TV show (and presumably the movie) to have the same feel.
I know that's not possible right now, but I'm sure he intended it to keep its original look and feel.
I'm really looking forward to seeing if this movie version measures up to the dream :)
I devised my sig. going around Hyde Park corner on a moped