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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."
"Really bad"
"vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad"
"bad on a big scale"
"bad on a small scale"
"staggeringly unfunny"
"unfunny, pointless crap"
"an abomination"
"amazingly, mindbogglingly awful"
"a terrible, terrible film"
(And that's from the short review)
We all knew they couldnt fit the whole series in one movie. It should have been a trilogy at least.
But to remove Milliways, Disaster Area, and prehistoric Earth completely? Thats just horrible. It is not the same story. They have commited murder here. This movie should be renamed.
As the review points out, the radio and play versions are two hours. There's no reason a movie couldn't be.
Sorry, but I guess I liked the Hitchhiker's series enough that I'll go see it anyway. Hell, I sat through the new Star Wars series thus far, and that was punishment enough.
As long as there's no JarJar, I guess I won't leave too pissed.
I remember similar discussions over plot removal in Lord of the Rings... I'll reserve judgement until I actually see the film, as opposed to reading someone's fanboy opinion.
I personally, with no intention to troll, feel that 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.
I'm sorry but these types of reviews are simply the worst on account of the person being so terribly close/obsessed to the orginal source material. Why not ask my ex-wife to give my current girlfriend a review of me?
-_-
Here is another review of the movie.
"One thing's for sure... Douglas Adams would be very proud. In the end, that's the greatest success that Robbie Stamp and Spyglass Entertainment and Jay Roach and Touchstone could have hoped for."
playing the Infocom game was a little unrealistic
Since when would you expect any incarnation of Hitchhiker's to be realistic?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
If this movie is as bad as the review states... It will have a long life in the theaters ;-)
(But, don't you think, Marvin should look like Bender?)
DNA himself knew that the book wouldn't work as a movie, so he wrote a completely new story-line. And if I remember the "interview" with the scriptwriter he tried to add a lot of stuff from the books that had to be cut.
So if you expect a re-telling of all the books you will be disappointed. It is the same way as the books are not a re-telling of the radio series (where are the bird people? or the robot disco?).
I'm not going to read any reviews, because I want to see the movie with an open mind. And I hope I remember to take my towel.
Captain Obvious arrives! You are a little late this morning. Did the Obviousmobile break down or something?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I've heard that this movie is so bad that the audience is urged to view it from the safe distance of thirty-seven miles from the screen in a well-built lightproof bunker, only after their eyes are gouged out. The director is now rumored to be serving eternity dead for "he really pissed off some geeks" reasons.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Now, we're all going to have to go see it just to se if it really is that bad.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
That the Hitchhiker's video game was good should not be trusted to review anything. I love Douglas Adams's work as much as the next person. Hell, I love it a whole hell of a lot more than the next person, but the Hitchhiker's video game was cleverly awful.
So many unsolvable puzzles. How the hell was I supposed to know that I needed the junk mail. If I had unlimited inventory, I would have picked up everything. It says fucking JUNK in the fucking name. Ha Ha. Really clever! Not fun to play though.
He calls Adams's dialogue "perfect." While it is teriffic, nothing is perfect. This review reeks of idolatry.
I don't know if this movie will be good. I will see it. I am encouraged that the producers appear to have put a great deal of care into the visuals judging by the trailers.
This isn't going to be Adams's work. I'm not expecting something as monumental as the radio series or the book. Even Adams himself lived in the shadow of that book. You don't make a masterpiece every time you paint a picture. I'm just looking for a good time.
"So we've got a movie. A piece of shit movie.That Douglas Adams lost is life over."
Yes, that's right. The move killed Douglas Adams. Nothing else. It was just that damn movie. Now go back to sleep.
I can take some random crap, but that's a bit too far.
From the list of things that aren't in the film:
* The Guide entry on towels
Those bastards forgot their towel!
HHGTTG is a Touchstone movie, not a Disney movie. Yes, yes, I know, Touchstone is owned by the Walt Disney Company, but the types of movies that Touchstone produces are far different from the types of movies that Disney produces.
Additionally, the creative decisions that Disney makes have no bearing on the creative decisions that Touchstone makes.
Thanks. Now I know why "Police Academy" was such a dismal flop, and no sequels were made.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
No, I think it was meant to be a radio drama originally. The books were adaptations that came later.
Now you'd think that adapting a radio program to a movie would be cake...just add visuals. Apparently that is not the case.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
Have you actually read the review? I didn't read the shortened version, so I'm not sure what was left out, but the reviewer does actually describe many of the specific problems he found with the film. While many of these have to do with changes from earlier works, most are critical of the movie simply in terms of how it works as a movie. Poorly-written diaglog, ill-constructed plot, bad acting, and lack of funny jokes are chief among the complaints, and although some of these problems are more noticable because the books/radio plays/etc. did them so well, the author says that these problems would exist even if this was the first HHG2G work ever.
Basically, I think that this movie is probably very bad, in the way that many movies are very bad, and makes many of their common mistakes. The fact that it was based on radio plays and a book that many people enjoyed isn't really relevent, in the end it's a bad movie that will be disliked by HHG2G fans and non-fans alike.
At least, that's what the review suggests. If you try reading it, perhaps you will gain some isight.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
RTFA. The reviewer complains that lots of inferior material is inserted instead of the good jokes that are pulled out.
The Guide is ALWAYS perfectly accurate. Reality might get things wrong sometimes. :)
If you've read the book, you already know the story, so how can the movie be spoiled? Of course I'm sure there are many people that went to see The Passion of the Christ and said, "Don't tell me how it ends!"
I agree that it's not meant to be the same as the book/tv series/radio, but appear to have:
- took out almost all reference to the Guide itself
- Removed most of the funny parts, which were mostly in the narration and asides rather than the main storyline. No towels? No convincing prosser to replace dent in front of the bulldozer? Not even a cup of tea AFAICS.
- Unnecessarily changed extremely funny lines to be less funny. The best example from the review being the whale monologue: ending the speech with "I wonder if it will be friends with me? *splat*" is much, much funnier than "I wonder if it will be friends with me? Hello, ground. *splat*". The trailing thought left by the first version is much funnier than the unnecessary repetition of something from earlier in the speech (I think I'll call it ground).
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.
Because for crying out loud - just compare the original radio play, the books, the new radio play, the tv series..
Douglas Adams was a sensible person, you don't go out and carbon copy what works sublimely as a radio play, and sell it as a book - you reinterpret, you cut bits you didn't like etc. etc.
From what I've seen, the movie looks sod all like the other interpretations, but it retains the spirit of the work - H2G2 doesn't work if you do a straight translation to film, just try and imagine it. You also have to deal with the largely chaotic nature of the original, the episodic framework, and the fact that in the play it's ok to stop a couple of times per episode to have the Guide explain what the hell is going on with Milliways for example.
Douglas Adams was barely faithful in transition.
The new radio series is totally disconnected from the first two, and that worked out great.
This guy knows so much about Douglas Adams? He should certainly know that. It was even a running gag - in cases where the Guide is innacurate, it is always reality that has it wrong.
So, Don't Panic, for crying out loud.
fortune -o
To be fair, the guide also looked like that in 1981 (back when the whole GUI was created using traditional animation techniques!)... so if anything it is ST:TNG that stole the look and feel from the Guide....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
God, now they're going to rape "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". I can hear the "high concept" on this one: "Harry Potter meets that Hobbit movie, with Talking Animals! We've "sexed up" the magic and the fighting!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Do you think that your average American moviegoing audience would have appreciated the extremely wry and dry Brit humor of the Hitchhikers guide?
Don't you think they should at least be given a chance?
According to the review, what you mean by "finished off" is "taken out behind the woodshed and shot, several times, in the face."
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
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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(Disclaimer: I've been a hitchhiker fan for longer than I care to remember, and was lucky enough to work with Douglas for a few years at The Digital Village, and have been peripherally involved with some of the publicity material for the film, so you can deduce whatever bias you like from that.)
Today I saw the movie for the second time, and once again I find myself coming to the conclusion that I must have been shown a different movie to the one that MJ Simpson saw. Having twice been in a cinema full of people who were laughing all the way through at the movie (and these are British people, for crying out loud!), and then reading that the movie is "staggeringly unfunny" leaves me somewhat confused. Partly because I heard all those people laughing myself with my own ears, but mainly because I loved the film.
For any hitchhiker fan, there will be moments in the film that you feel are not what you expected, or that bits were left out that you wish weren't. This is inevitable, no matter how good the movie was. This is just a fact of life when adapting a book - you're never going to capture everyone's imaginings and commit them to film. It's just part of the compromise you go through when you adapt a verbal medium to a visual medium. Neither are you going to 'get everything in'.
For me, the clearest indication of this is Simpson's laundry list of stuff that isn't in the film, that presumably he feels should be. Suffice it to say that if all that stuff was in the film, I don't think it would be a film I would want to watch. Pointing out that the description of the Vogon ships hanging in the air "in exactly the same way that bricks don't" is not in the film shows a stunning lack of understanding of what makes a good film. I can find a lot of descriptive prose in the books that didn't make it into the film - and you can probably guess why.
I mean, how was that going to work? Was Arthur going to say something like "See that spaceship Ford? Have you noticed the way it hangs in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't?" I'm sure that would have been the beginnings of a cracking screenplay.
The simple fact is, which most people seem not to grasp, is that, yes, you could have put, e.g. the full conversation between Arthur and Mr Prosser into the movie, and it might only have taken an extra 30 seconds, but in, say, a 90 minute movie, you only have a limited number of 30 second chunks. If you remained faithful to every piece of dialogue in the source material, you'd over-run by at least an hour. At least.
Also included in that list is a load of stuff from the 2nd book, when the film makers have repeatedly stated that this film is based on the first book only (and not on all the books as some posters seem to believe). I mean, if it was based on all the books, how much stuff would they have to have left out then?
I've seen moans that the Guide entry on towels is not in the movie, how could it be left out, etc. conveniently forgetting that this entry didn't even appear in the first radio series. Also, if you think towels don't feature in the movie, think again.
As for the movie that I actually watched - as I said, I loved it. The acting was great - far from finding Arthur to be 'an annoying little prat', I thought Martin Freeman's portrayal was very funny and accurate. Even when Martin changes the 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays' line, it still sounds natural - so natural that I didn't even notice the change until the second screening. Sam Rockwell's performance as the unceasingly presidential Zaphod is a joy to watch. The Vogons and their unflinching bureaucracy is captured perfectly via some new jokes and situations that I'm certainly not going to spoil here - I recommend seeing the movie yourself.
The design and aesthetics of the Heart of Gold are nothing short of fantastic, in the face of which the natural fan's reaction to observe that the HOG doesn
The most well known is Red Dwarf. A classic BBC sci-fi comedy that was well received all over the world. Well all over the world by geeks and nerds. For reasons unknown some americans wanted to make an american version of it but altered for american tastes. They made a pilot wich at times can be found on P2P networks. It is so bad that it never saw the light of day on american tv.
Why was it so bad? Somehow the american producers who obviously must have seen the original just didn't seem to get it. They changed all the characters that just clicked in the original into versions that just didn't work. The original crew is a bunch of loosers. Nobodies thrown together and never winning. The american version makes them more hollywood. Lister less of a slob. Rimmer likable. For some reason the american producers never seemed to have gotten what made the british original work and become so loved.
It is not on its own. The british comedy classic "doing porridge" was adapted for american tv as well and bombed. Where the original was a comedy set in prison where there was humor in a non-humorous setting, a classic ep has just the two actors talking during the night confinement in their cell, the american version came closer to a regular light hearted sitcom.
It is not all one way however. The american "who's the boss" has a british version as well but missing all the chemistry. It is cold, sensible british and misses the italian fire that tony danza and whats her name brought to the original.
The biggest problem I think in making an adoptation of something is in that you are making an adoptation. Red Dwarf, Doing porridge, Who's the boss ALL did well in their original country AND in other parts of the world. So why then try to chance it? Because you want to reach an even bigger market? How can you possibly achieve this? Only by making your version more bland and less likely to upset the tastes of your expanded audience. Remove the slobbness from lister, remove the harsh reality of doing time from a jail comedy, remove lenghty dialog from the guide.
Some saying goes something like this, the translator is a traitor. I think this is very true when trying to translate a story to a new audience. These people who made the guide movie did not try to make a movie for guide fans. They made on for the "hollywood" audience. In doing so they had to loose elements that were to "geeky" or to "nerdy" like the guide itself and replace it with slapstick.
This movie is simply not aimed at us guide fans. For every popular story there is a porn version. Complaining that these porn versions are not fatefull to the original is just as pointless as complaining these hollywood versions are not faithfull. They have an audience to please that does not know or care about the originals.
If there is going to be a guide movie then it can only really come from the BBC. Just take the tv eps and watch them in one sitting with stale popcorn and an overpriced coke.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Saw it this morning, actually, for the second time - first was a 95% complete cut similar to the one Simpson saw, the second was the final edit. I went along with my friends Tim Browse (his review) and Sean Sollé (his review) - all of us worked with Douglas at The Digital Village, a company we joined mainly because we were already massive Hitchhiker's fans. (If you need further credentials for me, look here.
We've been involved with the film at various stages. Thus, the disclaimer. However, please also be aware that none of us would be defending a film that crapped all over Douglas's work, especially since it was such a fundamental part of our youth.
Most (though not all) of the spoilers that Simpson reveals in his review are true. Yes, the lying-in-front-of-a-bulldozer dialogue has been cut short. Yes, several key Guide entries are missing. Yes, some of the dialogue isn't as funny as it could have been, and a couple of the gags are corny rather than sharp. (Note: I said a couple. It's nearly two hours of film, there are still tons of good lines in there.)
It's at this point that Simpson's opinion of the movie and mine diverge rather radically, because he seems to think that you can judge the film's merits almost purely on what's missing, in combination with things that don't appear as quite as he'd have liked them. Personally, I loved it to bits. It's not perfect, certainly, and I agree with a couple of his criticisms (though with about 5% of his severity). But I fundamentally feel that it's true to the spirit of Hitchhiker's in so many ways, not just through the storyline and script (which is far, far better than MJ would have you believe) but also through visuals and design that are utter genius, reimagining Douglas's creations in totally new ways that still seem completely in keeping with his intentions. It wears its Britishness in a far more open and interesting way than any previous version of the story - the Vogons, in particular, are a satire of traditional English bureaucracy that borders on Hogarthian.
I could go through MJ's review point-by-point and debunk all the stuff - and there's plenty of it - which he's blown wildly out of proportion, or which is based on utterly blinkered thinking, or which is just plain wrong. But then, that would be succumbing to exactly the kind of checklist mentality that he has, and god, how I hate that. He seems to just want the radio and TV series again, on a bigger budget, thus completely misunderstanding the demands that the different media have. His review reads like he went in with a notepad and took score through the film, subtracting ten points every time a line from the original went astray, and based his final opinion on that. As others have said in this thread, it's exactly the same kind of fanboy nonsense that had LoTR fans doomsaying before its release, and it's just bullshit.
If you're the kind of fan who works that way, who demands pure fidelity to the original and nothing but, then you won't like this movie. However, given that every incarnation of Hitchhiker's has been pretty different (and this movie is staunchly in the same tradition), I'd say that you're a fan who's utterly missing the point. Simpson, in loudly complaining that the film's plot veers wildly all over the place, makes me wonder which "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" he's a fan of, 'cos it certainly isn't one I've ever seen. His review is also the only negative one I've read from a major fan - contrast it with this review from Jens Kellenberg, who runs one of the biggest HHGTTG
You have to know that the original person attached to the script was "Mr Ghostbusters" Ivan Reitman. Douglas Adams hated this choice, as he felt Reitman lacked any of the subtleties or wit necessary to do the film (see also Meatballs, Kindergarden Cop, and Evolution). But the studio refused to back down. However, while Douglas was under contractual obligation to deliver a script, the contract didn't specify when. So Douglas sat on it. and sat on it. and sat on it. and basically refused to finish it unless another person was attached to the project. I believe that is where it stood when he died... material he had started writing twenty years prior and had intentionally never finished got finished by someone else and squished into a movie.
If you're desperate for more of that genuine Douglas Adams wit, check out
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,
The Long Dark Tea time of the Soul,
The Deeper Meaning of Liff, and
The Last Chance to See.
They're all very good, but The Last Chance to See has to be at the top of the list, if for no other reason than the idea of Mr. Hitchhiker's Guide getting paid to write a travelogue is so engaging, and the subject matter so brilliant. The Dirk Gently series is spot on as well. While the character archetypes are quite recognizable from the HHGTG, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Also, many people don't know this but the radio scripts diverge pretty far from the books, with entire planets and escapades not present in the texts. They're also worth a read. And the companion book to both gives insight and humor into the whole process, and is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the heck went on. It includes little DA gems like a sketch about a veteran kamikazee pilot.
The HHGTG videogame also contains a wealth of amazing material not available elsewhere, though you will need to cheat like mad to get through it. Starship Titanic the book wasn't wirtten by DA, but the game was. The game, sadly, isn't very good, though if you're desperate it was better than this movie sounds like it will be. The Parrot in that game was also a gem.
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