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Hitchhiker's Movie is Bad, says Adams Biographer
Rollerbob writes "MJ Simpson, who has 'been studying and documenting the life and career of Douglas Adams for more than 20 years', has written a very in-depth review and plot analysis of the Hitchhiker's movie. As well as the full review that contains SPOILERS , he has also published a shortened spoiler-free version, as well as a list of things from the radio plays, records, books and TV series that have not been included in the movie. Hitchhiker's fans, prepare to be like Marvin ... very depressed."
If this review is true, then I can't properly convey my disappointment.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing and I guess hoping that the movie could bring back some of the feeling I had from reading the first three books and playing the Infocom game was a little unrealistic.
I'm a big tall mofo.
They took most of the jokes out, and the jokes they left in were changed around. Also they simplified a bunch of stuff so that people who haven't read HHGTTG could understand what was going on, yet they didn't explain the plot really at all.
On a side note, I thought the BBC-TV series was actually pretty good, but apparently I'm the only one that thinks so. Maybe I have a soft spot for it because I saw it when I was much younger...
Also dialogue, which was (as the reviewer points out) always the best part.
An example he gives:
He gives other examples but I think you get the point. The things that made the story so much fun have been ruthelessly truncated.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
this is what happens when you let an American write English humour. The writer clearly had no concept of what made that scene funny - in his mind, it was a joke about not being able to find something. The dialogue simpoly went over his head.
:P
Or MAYBE, since it's a MOVIE, they don't have time to be true to the dialogue throughout the entire book. If they did that, the movie would be damn 10 hours long and un-released. You honestly think the joke you're quoting could really "go over someone's head"? It's not like it's a complicated or deep joke. It's funny for sure, I love the whole series of books, but you have to understand you just do NOT have time for that kind of dialogue throughout the entire movie. I'm sure there are plenty of scenes that are quite true to the original book. This just happens to be one that's not.
Joseph?
Sadly even if the screenwriter got it, that doesn't mean everyone else who gets to muck with the script and how it winds up onscreen did.
I saw a tv interview a while back with a screenwriter about the process that goes from initial story to what the actors actually say. sometimes the screenwriter is just some guy who does a lot of the actual typing work for ver 0.9beta when it's version 3.7 that hits the screen.
Mycroft
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Oh come on! How many people weren't planning on seeing it but have changed their minds based on a bad review? Sure most of us will go despite the review but no-one's going to see it because of the review.
Why is anything anything?
There really are some great independent films out there, even ones that are [gasp] foreign. Just yesterday i saw an amazing Hungarian movie, Kontroll, in downtown NYC.
It was the second time my girlfriend had seen it, and I'm definitely willing to see it again... I'm even tempted to order the DVD of of amazon.de.
It's the only movie i've seen in theatre in the past few months, and it was worth it.
If the reviewer is accurate, (and I have no reason to doubt it,) this movie is nothing like Mr. Adams would have wanted.
I believe Douglas Adams once made a comment about how good humor was a gift to the intelligent - those that weren't intelligent really didn't understand it. Judging from the long review, this movie isn't aimed at an intelligent audience.
I guess I'll wait for it to hit video (maybe late May,) and rent it on a day when I want to punish myself and feel bad.
Except this guy gives specifics, and the specifics are terrible.
This guy also complains that the guide's entries are removed from the script. Well no shit. You can make an aside to "reprint" big swaths of text in a book, you can't do that in a movie. About the only thing you can do in a movie is pause the film, do a voice over, and then resume the film. While this might work once or twice, it won't work over the long term. The movie becomes slow, tedious, and boring.
Hell, even complains that Vogon are ships aren't described as "hanging in space in exactly the same way bricks don't". Of course that description isn't in there. You describe things when you have to imagine it, you don't describe things everyone can experience directly. I expected the guy to complain that the high performance ship they steal in Milways "wasn't black enough" because his eyes didn't slide off of it.
Does the movie suck? I don't know. Given the material and Hollywood's recent track record with films in general, there's a very good chance that it does. Do I believe this guy's review? Hell no. He's the Comic Book Guy.
Worst review ever.
absolutely... Bender is Marvin with Zaphod's personality...
No one - bar perhaps Billy Connolly - is funny all the time. And funnily enough, James Bond was never designed to be a comedy. Give the poor guy a break, he's just trying to make some money without going insane trying to make every last thing imaginable humourous.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
I don't trust most movie critics because honestly most wouldn't know a good movie if it bit them on the butt. And just because you're writing someone's biography it doesn't mean you understand them, or even -Like- them!
The proof will be in the pudding. We will all just have to see it and make up our own minds. Taking the word of someone who's life is so boring that he spends all of his time writing about other people's isn't what I would call a good bet.
Firstly, I do agree that while Americans can of course appreciate English humour, they're not very good at recreating it. Most Englishmen in Hollywood movies seem to be stereotyped versions of Lorded upper class types, although movies such as "Lock, Stock and two smoking barrels is changing that". Apart from that American humour, especially American Hollywood humour is usually based on extremely overdone gags, possibly because the producers feel they need to dumb the movie down enough so that vast audiences will understand it. Subtlety is not one of Hollywood's strengths.
In other words, this movie would probably never have worked out in the first place. Hollywood is not capable of subtlety, especially in humour, and good English humour involves subtlety.
I'm grateful for the review and all the spoilers. I won't be going to watch this film, although, to be honest, I knew that when I saw the trailer.
I sat through the 6-part TV series and got (at least some measureable amount of) enjoyment out of it. I'll be impressed if the movie is less entertaining.
And it's actually funny and entertaining. I have heard the radio play, and read at least the first book. This is a case of someone WAY too familiar with something that has changed his brain chemistry and unwilling to see something new in the old. Look, if you write an 8 page diatribe on a movie, and feel that the movie is a crime against humanity, perhaps you are a little too emotionally invested. It's funny and quirky and the whole time I was watching it, I couldn't believe how similar it was to the radio play. Consider the source of this man's review, he is a FANATIC.
I was amazingly excited about Sky Captain because of the style and the fact that it was computer generated...after the terrible reviews I was too depressed to go to see it in the theaters.
I rented it through Netflix and enough time had passed that I was excited again. It was bad...it was so bad that I stopped paying attention near the end and started surfing the net...
I'm glad I listened to the reviews and didn't pay $8.
Well, I always thought of him as having a smaller head. I took 'brain the size of a planet' as a metaphor of processing power.
They've been a little more literal, taking it as hyperbole.
The posture is right though...
Here's what I personally would have liked to see happen:
1.) Don't even bother to do it live action. Animation. 2D classical drawn animation. No CGI crap...humans still don't look right in CGI, and H2G2 was very humanoid-centric. Get someone with a cartoony sense to do the character design. Andreas Deja would be perfect. Then get a "dream team" of animators from both sides of the Pacific to work on it. This could have been Touchstone Pictures' triumphant return to animation. "Not since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?!"
2.) If you animate the movie, you don't have to get people to portray the roles who are exactly the right age to play them. For instance, you could have Michael Palin as Arthur, Eric Idle as Ford, Bill Murray as Zaphod and Jennifer Saunders as Trillian. Never mind that they would be the absolute PERFECT cast, they would be too old to portray them live action. But as voices for animated characters...badabingbadabangbadaboom! They would have been perfect.
3.) Be as faithful to the materials Douglas Adams left behind for the movie as possible. And when in doubt, consult those materials + the books + the radio show + the TV show. If the people who did this H2G2 movie gave Adams as much propers as Robert Rodriguez did Frank Miller with Sin City it would have rocked rather sucked as badly as it seems to according to this review.
The big problem with such a plan, though? Americans think that cartoons=kid stuff. It takes a Pixar or a "Shrek" to get adults into theatres to watch animation. Great animation for grownups like The Triplets of Belleville, Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' On Heaven's Door and Innocence: Ghost In The Shell II gets lost. (Yeah, they all were put out domestically by Sony Pictures. They have no idea of what to do with their animated properties.) If the two Matrix sequels were as ripping good as the Animatrix shorts, they would be artistic successes but box-office failures. The current state of affairs sucks, dammit.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Try Empire, a British film magazine that has been panicking over the Hitchhiker's movie since it was first announced, and has now released their full review.
4 stars (out of 5) and the quickie write up says:
Mostly harmless. A very British, very funny sci-fi misadventure that's guaranteed to win converts. Want to go to The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe now, please.
They admit it's not perfect, but their review's a damn sight more positive than the linked one.
As we said, those hardcore Hitchhikers out there have little to worry about. Although they should be warned that the movie's faithfulness means all its best jokes will be very familiar. For them, it's more a case of basking comfortably in the nostalgia than laughing out loud. But if you're new to all this, and have no idea about the significance of towels, or what a whale and a bowl of petunias have in common, then, boy, are you in for a treat...
Mark
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Adverbs--and hence adverbial clauses, such as this one--obey no fixed syntactic order n english. they can appear anywhere in a sentence. Not every possible permutation has style, but they all have grammar.
I went boldly.
I boldly went.
Boldly, I went.
reinvent Shakespeare
I guess you're talking about Romeo + Juliet, which in my opinion is the best adaption of Shakespeare I've ever seen. It transported the story to a 'modern' stage, yet conserved the timelessness of the original by doing so in a rather abstract way, using visually and metaphorically *very* rich imagery. It does a very good job of telling the story, and while I think that Leo di Caprio is one of the worst actors around, Shakespeare's brilliant dialogs brought out some nice acting I'd never have expected from him, ever.
I might be sounding like a fanboy, but actually I've seen *so many* interpretations of R+J, most of them either terrible or simply not getting the spirit of the original, that the movie to me really stood out. I hadn't seen it when it came out because I found the trailers so horrible (plus, or rather minus, it starred Leo), but a few years later a girl-friend took me out to watch it without telling me beforehand. (A sinister plan as she knew *exactly* why I hadn't seen it.) I left the cinema pleasantly surprised.
Mind to share your criticism of the movie? I greatly admire Shakespeare's works, and if more people decide to do such intelligent adaptions of material which is that old, more power to them. I might even bear watching some hours of JLo or Ben Affleck or whomever.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
theres no place like 127.0.0.1
Actually that sounds normal, the newly converted have a tendency to greater fanaticism than those who have grown up accepting thier brand of 'the one truth'.
I had herd that the cronicles had some relation to his religeous beliefs and conversion back and forth, just didn't remember the details.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
"Oh yes, they were 'on display' in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the leopard.'"
Having read the books again recently, that was one of the lines that stuck out as trying way too hard to be clever. The bit about the stairs and the light being out is funny; "Beware of the leopard" pushes it too far.
Not to say I like the movie version, but I don't think Lawrence Olivier could have pulled that line off and made it sound credible, much less funny.
My extremely peripheral involvement with the film really just meant that I was even more anxious about whether I would like the finished product or not. Seeing the film for the first time was really a great relief, as I realised that they hadn't screwed it up, not by a long way.
And as for my point that a bunch of people invited to a pre-screening (in one case largely consisting of distributors, critics, reviewers etc) laughed a lot seems like a valid point to me. My point is that, as Tycho would say, humans liked this film, and I'm pretty sure that's the species that will generally go to see this film.
As I said: Look at these people. They probably think they're having a good time!
And why didn't that idiot Cleese just say `this parrot is dead' and walk out of the shop?
I don't think Lawrence Olivier could have pulled that line off and made it sound credible, much less funny.
Yet somehow Simon Jones manages it. Perhaps because he's a better comic actor than Olivier.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
As a result, most of the people at my company are going to go see the movie so that they can learn where my last name came from.
It will be freaking embarressing if they all go and then come back saying that the movie sucked! I couldn't bring myself to read the article because I'm going to go see it no matter what (I'll be the one at the San Francisco Metreon wearing a bathrobe with a towel embroidered with "42" on it).
Dumbing down movies "for the Americans" is just a crock of shit. It's a crock of shit that "too smart for you" Hollywood types seem to, for the most part, sincerely believe in. It's not necessarily true. The Lord of The Rings movies by Peter Jackson did not recreate the books 100%, but did recreate a "faithful" version. It did pretty well in the box office last I heard. You can satisfy the geeks (the fans) and have your broad audience, too.
Boycott Sony
I'm minoring in linguistics, but I guess the movie does rather cater for my CS side. That said, I didn't totally understand it on my first pass, either, I'll rewatch it and hope to be better off.
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I agree with you. I recently had the fortune to see Robbie Stamp (producer) in person at a presentation he did at Valhalla Cinema in Sydney, Australia, and I left feeling very confident about this film (I haven't seen it yet).
Robbie was a personal friend of Douglas and knows full well that his reputation is invested in this movie. They have tried to give fans of the previous works their dues whilst also incorporating new stuff, which fits in with Douglas Adams' view that the HHGG was a constantly evolving work in progress. The amount of care and attention to unseen details was amazing and I for one believe that it will be a huge success.
Robbie also explained why Zaphod's second head was done the way it was (MIB2 "stole" the idea from the original series so they wanted to remain fresh by doing it in a new way) and many other details that the true fans will appreciate.
Give the movie a chance guys and don't succumb to one shitty review.
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