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."

Comments

Ah crap.

[bigtallmofo]

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.

Re:Not just bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Here we go again....

[ArbitraryConstant]

Except this guy gives specifics, and the specifics are terrible.

Also dialogue, which was (as the reviewer points out) always the best part.

An example he gives:

"I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the Display Department."
"With a torch."
"The lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But you found the plans, didn't you?"
"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.'"

Or, as the movie version has it:

"I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"But you found the plans, didn't you?"

He gives other examples but I think you get the point. The things that made the story so much fun have been ruthelessly truncated.

Re:American Screenwriter

[Mycroft_VIII]

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

Worse than Vogon Poetry

[wasted]

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.

Re:Worse than Vogon Poetry

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

this movie isn't aimed at an intelligent audience

No, it's aimed at Americans.

I'm not saying this as flamebait, I'm saying it as an example of precisely what the studios would have been thinking as they tried to figure out what would bring them the largest possible return on their investment. British humor seems to be popular with geeks in the US, but it doesn't appeal to the population at large. And this isn't meant to be a value judgement about which type of humor is better. Americans do great slapstick and physical comedy and that isn't as well appreciated by the British. In fact, Britain has produced a few geniuses in the area of physical comedy who are appreciated everywhere in the world apart from in Britian (eg. Benny Hill).

Re:Worse than Vogon Poetry

[Hast]

Reminds me of an interview I read with Terry Pratchett. He said that his book "Mort" was up for a movie with an American movie studio. They had made a script out of it and presented it to the descision makers, their comment was "Really good! But lose the Death character, it's too depressing."

For those that don't know that book is about how Death takes on an apprentice (Mort). He's pretty crusial to the plot.

Re:Don't Panic

[bluenawab]

absolutely... Bender is Marvin with Zaphod's personality...

Re:Don't Panic

[Monty_Lovering]

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...

Re:Great Hollywood Arkleseizure

[MsGeek]

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.

Want a good review instead?

[Mark Hood]

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

Re:In other artform can you find...

[Doctor O]

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.

Re:It'll all end in tears, I know it.

[pyr0r0ck3r]

I seem to remember hearing that the Cronicles started out as a parody of religeon before he changed his mind became a christian.

Nope. I did an annotated bibliography on Tolkien and Lewis, and was actually suprised to find out that by the time Lewis started writing the Chronicles, his good buddy Tolkien had already convinced Lewis that Christianity was the way to go. Interestingly enough, Tolkien, the one who was born, raised, and stayed catholic his entire life, did not let his religion seep through into his writing as much as Lewis did. Interesting point though, Lewis converted to Protestantism, instead of Catholicism. I believe it was shortly after this that Lewis and Tolkien stopped talking, because Lewis started being a prick about the whole thing.