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BBC Reviews Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
An anonymous reader writes "Now that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has made its debut in London, reviews are now beginning to trickle in. The BBC's review can be summed up in one sentence: '... somewhere in the production process the crew has lost sight of the fundamental aspect of the books - they were immensely funny."
[Fill In Book Name Here] is not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped.
Choose from:
Note: Those marked with an '*' may actually, really and truly, suck.
Seriously, mixing american actors with british actors and trying to turn something that wasn't very bad as a BBC TV series into a movie would be difficult, especially with the Hollywood penchant for wanting it to end differently than the book so the audience would be surpried and trying to make britishisms translate into equally funny americanisms or vice-a-versa. Imagine the following scenario: (brace thyself) A Hollywood remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail... que horror, eh? Imagine (told you to brace yourself, you sensitive clod!) hip-hop actors, dimbulb comedy actors from sitcoms and the utter flattening of comedic timing to accomodate dumbed down humor. Yeah. Somethings are better left alone. Better to just go see Spamalot.
I do expect Rickman's dead-pan voice to be perfect for Marvin, but that's about all.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Unless the cover says "Don't Panic."
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
The "immensely funny" thing is curious. To be honest, completely honest... I didnt find douglas adams' work to be all that genuinely funny
Interesting to read, and written with an easy style that said "come back and read more!" sure, but not funny.
Not to me, personally, and not speaking for anyone else.
Where's the torrent? ;)
put the what in the where?
Panic.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I could not believe how awful this film was. The story has almost nothing to do with previous versions of Hitchhiker's Guide and just rambles all over the place, but not in any humorous or interesting or entertaining or enjoyable way.
All the changes from the book and TV show and radio play seem to have been made for no reason and not only do they not add anything, they actually make it worse.
NONE of the books/radio shows agree with each other, so why should you expect the movie to?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I think you all ought to know that I'm very depressed.
I absolutely HATED "Napoleon Dynamite." I laughed ONCE during the entire movie. Yet, the reviews were raving about it. Then we had the recent article about the guy that's spent like 20 years studying Douglas Adams and his books/etc, and he hated the movie. Other reviews of this movie said it was clever & funny. Now the BBC says that there were just a few chuckles.
Generally, I think that humour is in the eye of the beholder. I never think that Penny Arcade comics are funny, but often still laugh at User Friendly.
Bottom line: The movie probably doesn't suck that bad at all, but the "The book was better" fanatics are going to jump all over it.
Did the script veer too far away from the source material or tie itself in knots trying to keep faith with it?
Bizarrely, I think the answer is both.
Funny, I was almost certain it was 42
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
Well, he also called it a "mess."
Personally, I plan on seeing it, but I also plan on going out of my way to read every last negative review and whiny Aint-It-Cool-News tirade which warns of how bad it is before seeing it.
The more I lower my expectations going in, the better the chances that I might extract a little pleasure out of watching what is bound to be a very flawed adaptation of my absolute favorite childhood novel.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
While I haven't seen it yet, I'm kind of disappointed they only made one movie, there's enough material for more. Imho they should have announced it to be a trilogy (and then actually release 5 movies, one for each book).
You know the thing that made the books so snappy ... it was that compared to Arthur, Ford was an absolute nut. Zaphod was bombastic. Marvin was quite possibly a sorrier character. All that contrast was fairly extreme and therefore, the wossname, chemistry worked, because each's point of view was quite extraordinary. And yet, all were sane within their idiom.
They could have just sat around in chairs on board the Heart of Gold for 90 minutes cracking jokes about earthman-monkey, diodes down the left side aching, vogon poetry, etc. and many book/play fans would gobble it up. This is trying to mass appeal, what already had mass appeal. See the problem?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Sci-Fi Channel can remake it as a mini-series with a couple well known American actors and a bunch of unknown actors at a studio in Eastern Europe, with funny costumes, but a decent plot. :)
Fight Club was a phenomenal book that survived the transition to a movie, and then some.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The previews of the movie don't look good for use Adams fans. They seem to emphasize special effects and the bustle of the books, but give no evidence of the deep humor and insane and yet insanely self-consistent universe that Adams created. Rather than create Adams' mind-boggling humor (which is harder), they seem to have created the usual array of eye-boggling visuals.
I hope the actual movie is better than the previews.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"Maths" is what we in the UK call Mathematics. It's not an error.
I'm sick of all the FUD floating around... i'm officially not reading anymore /. articles i'm just going to go see the thing for myself... hope it doesn't suck
The Answer
While Dent is a familiar cipher, audiences will be left clueless by Ford Prefect, bemused by Zaphod Beeblebrox and indifferent to Trillian.
Personally, in reading the books, I've always been left feeling quite indifferent to Trillian. Almost like she's a background character with little to no importance. So it sounds like they at least got that right.
Ender-
Nothing to see here
Thank you for another great negative review, thus assuring my expectations will be appropriatly low so I can enjoy the film.
Curse you for giving away the part about Malkovich, it would have been an entertaining surprise.
It's British English. Sometimes they call a truck a "lorry," sometimes they call a television "the tube," other times they call elevators a "lift."
My god. This is just about the most culturally blind, obviously offensive, most idiotic thing I have ever seen on the Internets.
Never read Fight Club. Saw the movie and thought, 'damn, not another "crazy guy" film'. Didn't read Forrest Gump, but my sister's opinion was the film was considerably better. A rarity it seems.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I could not believe how awful this film was
Oh, come on, now. Deliberatly saying something's bad just so that the downloaders can claim they're sticking it to The Man for making bad movies... that's so, well, earlier this morning.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Entry for new movie updated from: "Harmless" to: "Mostly harmless"
Do not disturb. Already disturbed. http://www.teaaddictedgeek.com
At least the Unix version of "Oracle 8.5" is true to the book.
I've moved onto the sequel, "Oracle 9i, The Wrath of Larry Ellison" myself.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I, Robot didn't suck. It just had absolutly nothing to do with the book. I bet your opinion of it would be a lot higher if they had stuck with the original title, "Hardwired".
Technoli
..unlike the books.
The radio show and books (so far as I've gone through them) agree with each other by and large all the way (I've heard a half-dozen eps of the original radio show, mind you, and they differed in about only one story arc to that point). All of the biggest notes are in there. From what I know the TV series wasn't THAT far off. This movie is VERY, VERY far off of ALL the other previous formats, to the point that it doesn't just change a story arc here and there... it reorganizes everything about the whole universe- including the way the characters percieve the Ultimate Question, which is something that's always been very near and dear to the series.
compared to Arthur, Ford was an absolute nut.
Do you know what my favorite moment in the story is?
When Arther Dent, stuck on past Earth, announces that he has decided to go mad.
Ford suddenly appears and agrees that it's a good idea.
What I like about that moment is that I didn't really care for anything which came after it. Don't get me wrong, the prose was still very funny, but all this stuff of Aurther learning to fly, a planet-wise parody of what a boring sport cricket is, the truck-driving rain god, and the destruction of all possible alternate realities... It just wasn't up to snuff with the book material spawned from the original radio plays.
So, I have decided the following:
Arthur really did go mad at that moment. Ford never showed up. Arthur never learned to fly. Mattress creatures did not flollop. The reincarnated plant did not seek out revenge against Arthur. None of it happened. It was all just the delusions of Arthur's madness.
Looking at the final three and a half books of the trilogy in this light makes them much more enjoyable for me, especially since it discards the "Goddammit! I'm not writing a sixth book ever! Fuck all you drooling fanboys who will demand that my publisher lean on me to write more!" fatalistic ending. YMMV.
For that matter, one could take this premise and craft a fairly amusing fan-fic which picks up just as Arthur recovers his sanity, still stuck among the cave men.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
An example from the famous babelfish passage:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
How the heck are you supposed to film that and keep some semblance of flow to the story? You could do it as a voiceover I suppose, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot yet passages like this are a defining feature of an Adams book. I'll be interested to see if they attempted to put passages like this in the movie and if they can pull it off.
Compare with LOTR, or Harry Potter, or any Michael Crichton novel, which are more plot driven works and thus can translate to a visual medium like movies and still capture the spirit of the original text much better. At least IMHO
Still, I'm intent on seeing the movie and hope it retains some of the classic Adams humour...
I tried to read the article but both my sunglasses turned completely black!!
And Fight Club ends completely different in the book, not a Hollywood ending at all. Simply for the ending I'd recommend it.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The movie wasn't a retelling of the book, but you'd be nuts to try it. The book is a string of disjoint short stories. The same characters keep poping up, but they are complete stories unto themselves. You could perhaps make a mini-series out of them, but I don't think the majority of the American public would GET IT.
The movie it self though was very true to Asimov's theme, which was basically "Given these three laws, how can things go wrong while the three laws are still being obeyed... and then how can I get these characters out of this mess?" additionally, they brought in the concept of the 0th law that we saw at the end of the Robot novels (although in this story line with tragic consequences).
Perhaps the name was a bad choice, but it got the fan's attention. However, equally well it could have been called "The Three Laws", or something simmilar.
The Hollywood Spectaculomatic will automatically analyze any for for content, theme, humor, plot, sub-plot, charactizations, social commentary, cultural reference, and political ramifications; cross analyze the results against a target demographics intellectual, visceral, and spiritual entertainment needs and produce a movie that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original book. Buy yours today!
he's a link troll, probably amigoro in a new user name, or some other pathetic twat with nothig better to do than try to get ad views with fake articles.
stay away from mithuro.com
I see your point. The first couple times I thought the H2G2 books (the first 3 anyway) were quite funny. The 4th was thought provoking and the 5th quite a bummer.
I did find, 10 years after reading the first three that I found them to be more cynical than I recalled, with some fairly biting sarcasm embodied by certain characters and actions I didn't really see before. Eventually I believed it was funny while taking aim at a lot of things Douglas Adams probably found frustration with, like satire. There certainly are some very visible satirical references, but it seemed to me that like much humor there is often a target which is true, though by not being familiar with it we don't get all of the joke.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I found it bizarre to watch the first time. But now for some odd reason I remember parts of it, and it seems funnier now.
Lines like:
"Pedro offers his protection", or "You gonna eat those tots?", while on there own don't sound funny, it the right context with people who know the reference can be fairly entertaining.
I'd say Napoleon is funnier after you've see it, not while you're actually watching it.
I still liked it better than "Friends", ugh, I'm glad that's over.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Fight Club was a phenomenal book that survived the transition to a movie, and then some.
Screw the movie and the book. What I'd really like to see is a Fight Club made up of members of Slashdot.
It would be no surprise to me to see guys bring Light Sabres and those Klingon BetleHs.
To sum up. "Pure Awesomeness!"
Live forever, or die trying.
...for everytime negative reviews came out for a movie I ended up loving....I won't be sitting here at work surfing the internet right now....
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Wrong. The relationship between Helena Bonham Carter's and Edward Norton's characters had more substance than just fucking and running away from the space monkeys. There are many different changes that both diluted and twisted Chuck Palahniuk's message.
Spoilers of both the movie and novel below. If you don't want to know, don't look.
Marla had breast cancer. In the movie, she just finds a lump. Edward Norton's character in the book had cancer for 5 minutes. Gone. The fight scene where Edward Norton beats up himself happens at the office of some film manager, not at the auto manufacturer's office. Edward Norton's character also shoots a man at a Pressman Hotel Party. That's out too. The ending was completely different in the movie than the book. The one thing that bugged me about the movie, was that Edward Norton never had the hole in his cheek from fighting. His character talks about the hole in his cheek constantly in the novel, but the movie didn't have it. Furthermore, he bites off the tip of his tongue in a fight and doesn't have it reattached, and the movie left that out.
Considering all the changes, I would hardly call it a survival. He, both Tyler Durton and Edward Norton's character were a lot smarter than the movie makes them out to be
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
I, Robot didn't suck. It just had absolutly nothing to do with the book. I bet your opinion of it would be a lot higher if they had stuck with the original title, "Hardwired".
...", that is.
Yes, our opinion would be different if they had refrained from RAPING ASIMOV'S CORPSE!
Then again, I haven't seen it, because of what Will Smith said on Leno: "It's very faithfull to the book [...] My character is the only man on earth who doesn't trust robots, everyone else does..."
Yeah, that is the exact opposite of the book, jackass.
Asimov's estate should sue them for diffamation... if they weren't busy swimming in their giant cash-filled swimming pools from all the horrible crap they've sold labelled as "Asimov's
You can't take the sky from me...
Maybe the moral is that just converting a great book to a movie isn't enough to have a great movie: you still have to have a good director, good casting, and a good screenwriter. (In the case of Princess Bride, Goldman was the screenwriter, and it was his idea to cast Andre the Giant). I also think the Princess Bride (which other than a few edits such as the Zoo of Death, is almost unchanged from the book) shows that it should have been possible to import entire scenes, unaltered, from the radio series and novels and get something which would be as funny- if not funnier- than the originals.
The radio series shows how goddamn funny the dialogue is when well acted. I thought "...all the diodes down my left side" was merely amusing on the page, but I was howling with laughter when I heard it read in that chronically depressed voice on the radio plays. Frankly you have to be one hack of a director to screw up the Hitchhiker's Guide: you've got a wealth of great material, both written and spoken. Your only problem is the painful decision of what not to put in.
You'll leave wishing that you had gone to see "MySQL Cookbook" or "Practical Postgresql", which were both showing at the same theater, and the tickets were free.
Naaah, MySQL Cookbook might be free, but they only recently decided to bother installing seats in the theater.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Well, OK, fine. There's many good bits in MH, but why end on such a downer? And even though the dark ending did sort of fit in with the general theme of "the big bad universe doesn't care" it seemed pointless. I got the sense Adams was in a bad mood while writing the thing.
If it can survive the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall, it can survive a bad movie.
...
You could use it to hold popcorn, to wrap yourself in if the theatre is too cold, and if you carry a tube of cyanide stitched into the lining, you could kill yourself if it is too much to bear.
Most importantly, you could cry into it if the reviews are right
I go to high school in the 00's and tater-tots are still alive and kicking.
Dang, at least the ones we ate in the 80's had been killed before being served to us!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Don't panic!" .immensely funny!"
"Crammed full of witty erudition!"
"A . . . comedic romp!"
"Sam Rockwell does a great turn as Zaphod Beeblebrox!"
". .
"Outstanding production design and some fantastic visual effects!"
"Charming!"
Sam Rockwell does a great turn as Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed president of the galaxy; Mos Def is passable as Ford Prefect; while Zooey Deschanel is beguiling as Trillian
Then a few paragraphs down we get this:
Did I say characters? Hmmm. While Dent is a familiar cipher, audiences will be left clueless by Ford Prefect, bemused by Zaphod Beeblebrox and indifferent to Trillian.
Indifferent to Trillian? I thought the actress playing her was "beguiling"!?! How can an actress potray a character in a beguiling way that leaves the audience indifferent? That's almost as funny as some of Adams' turns of speech. :)
In brief, the reviewer liked the movie, but didn't like all of it. In fact, he called it a "charming mess". Having been a fan of Adams' work for over twenty years I had always been under the impression the same could be said of the books. And even Adams' own later sequels lacked the punchy humor and wit of the originals. It is hard to make lightening strike twice.
I recently downloaded the BBC's HG2G TV adaptation. Although some parts are brilliant, many parts drag and are truly awful. Translating Adams' writing style into a visual medium is bound to be difficult. Even the British couldn't get it all right.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
...instead of just something difficult to translate to a movie. Did the creators of this movie read the books, listen to the radioshows, or even watch the BBC TV versions? In all 3 the book was a character, it had it's own voice, it's own dialogue and was some of the funniest shit I have ever read, heard and seen. Much like in LOTR, Peter Jackson nearly made the ring a character and the ring did not have much to say. The Book in HHGTTG has tons to say.
How about I'll call it British English, and you call it English? That way we'll both be happy.
.o0('course furriners aye seem to nae ken the difference atween 'England' and 'Britain', an' I da suppose that helps onybody work out fit the richt thing tae cry it is.)
I agree that it seems reasonable just to refer to it as English, as the previous poster says, 'English English' seems redundant.
After all, 'British English' ought by denfinition to refer to the version of English spoken throughout the Kingdom of Scotland as well as the Kingdom of England (not to mention the Principality of Wales and the Province of Northern Ireland). However, Scottish English - aka Scottish Standard English - is a seperate beast (or should that be beastie). The cultural influces from Gaelic and Scots mean not just the vocabulary varies - the actual grammar does too.
To me, it only seems appropriate to use the more general term British English in specific circumstances.
You must have been an awfully precocious 7-year-old if you understood just about anything about H2G2.
;-)
I wonder what that would do to a growing lad, expecting triple-breasted whores from Eroticon Six, and only ever managing to find the double-breasted kind... I hope he wasn't too scarred
You can't take the sky from me...
If that was a BBC review, what is THIS?
Yes, our opinion would be different if they had refrained from RAPING ASIMOV'S CORPSE!
That's going a little too far. While I'd agree the movie is a travesty demonstrating that Hollywood is hard pressed to produce even one new idea in almost a hundred years, some of the dangers the movie obsessed over were at least hinted at in Asimov's works. That there is some gold dust sprinkled on, however, does not change that what you have stepped in is primarily a turd. If they had left the original "Hardwired" title in, and yanked the attempts to exploit Asimov's name, it would merely be bad; if such had been offered on DVD free with a box of cereal, I'd have bought the box provided I wasn't allergic to the cereal. (Five brand name candidates, last I counted.)
As is... I took different measures.
Then again, I haven't seen it
Given my respect for film, I didn't want to trash the movie without seeing it. On the other hand, if it was as bad as reported, I didn't want any of my money going anywhere near the people responsible. So when the DVD came out, for my first and only time for a Hollywood release, I downloaded BitTorrent, found a pirate torrent, and tied up my DSL for two days. If it was any good, I would have bought it. After watching it, I deleted it. I have better uses for the 5GB of storage.
Having seen it, the only reason I feel that the time spent watching it was not completely wasted is that I can say with a clear concience: It is a Piece of Crap; Someone Please Buy Harlan Ellison The Movie Rights.
The HHGTTG movie sounds bad, but not that bad. I might catch a matinee... but I'll bring a towel to wrap around my head, just in case it's worse than I expect.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I'll put it short and sweet. To expect the HHGG we know and love. Actually. Just fuhgit about it...at least on the big screen. Why? Two reasons.
#1. Most of the best humor just wouldn't work in a movie format. Why? To do it well you'd need an absurd amount of time, and as well, the story would start to drag on. Really.
Now, from what I'm hearing, they're filming a TON of material for the DVD version. Meaning that all the stuff that didn't make it into the theatrical cut, may very well make it into an actual "Guide" cut, with all those little asides that make the book.
A DVD package with "Don't Panic" on the cover and given the LotR extended edition treatment? Oh yes.
#2. Like it or not, he's just not the same guy he was when he wrote the book. Hell, he wasn't the same guy when he wrote the sequals. And one thing that DNA wanted, was to update HHGG..the philosophy and feeling behind it, to get it out of his past and move it into the present. And because of that, after he died, when the production team had a doubt about the tone of any of the material, they looked up his latter stuff. To see how it would go, and work.
Maybe that's the ultimate problem. The true fans wanted the classic, but that's just not going to happen.
This, of course, was not the point. The comedy derives from Fawlty's failure, and bystanders' horror at the way this man runs a hotel, just as The Office runs on David Brent's horrifically misguided approach to management. Both take on characters we've all met - surly hoteliers or awful coworkers - and then eliminate the redeeming features and turn everything wrong about them up to eleven.
I think it's this dark side that drives a lot of British comedy and makes it so distinct from the American variety. American remakes tend to kill off British comedy, because they try to force in some Beautiful People when the story really calls for twisted monstrosities...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's from the Law of Conservation of S's. Consider the following sentences:
American English: I wish you were as interested in math as you are in sports!
English English: I wish you were as interested in maths as you are in sport!
You can't take away an s without it popping up somewhere else.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
On the night that the final episode of the 2nd series was first broadcast on the BBC my wife went into labour and we rushed off to the maternity ward, taking a radio with us. We were able to listen to the episode just before my son was born.
... what I didn't expect was that the new Doctor Who would copy my son's Manchester dress sense !
So it was inevitable that my son would grow up to be an active contributer to the H2G2 website
Paul
www.opencouncil.org
Open
I think you find "Britain" in fact means "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (people with a [dangerously IMO] over inflated sense of national identity and bored people looking to pick fight aside), the specific meaning being context sensitive. Both the offical government appointed tourism agency and the Wikipedia entry seem quite happy with this short hand.
God forbid it should not be the complete title in it's entirity every single time, lest the IRA get over excited about it and decide to blowup some [more] children. Thanks but I'll stick with using 'Britain' (and 'UK' when I'm feeling like being particularly terse).
I think we've had enough disagreement and killing over it, and we could officialy rename the entire country Earwig , or 'nation fourty four' (after the country code) for all I care.