The weekend is over and the money crunchers at Disney are kicking up their heels. The long-awaited film adaptation of Douglas Adams's 1980 novel
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy arrived in theaters on Friday, and it soundly thrashed
XXX: State of the Union at the box office, to the surprise of everyone in Hollywood, none of whom would ever be caught dead reading a piece of geek cult fodder like
Hitchhiker's. (Who am I kidding? Make that: none of whom would ever be caught dead reading.) Oblivious as they are to the fact that
Hitchhiker's $21.7 million total is probably more a reflection of a huge fanbase who've been waiting twenty-five years to see this film than a true indicator of its global financial legs, the denizens of the Hollywood brain trust are busy reading all the wrong messages from this.
(My favorite quote, from Rory Breuer, Head of Distribution for Sony, whose Vin Diesel-less
XXX brought in a measley 13.7 million: "Certainly, we're disappointed, because it's a film we all believed in. We have Ice Cube, who is a big star, and I think he's one of those rare actors who really can do just about anything." Yeah, Rory, those of us who couldn't get enough of his Hamlet at Lincoln Center last year are just as shocked. Not to mention his Willy Loman at the Long Wharf: a revelation, pure and simple. Sigh... Just another case of the spaceman keepin' the brother-man down.)
In any case, the movie itself, for those of you who care, is a bit of a mixed bag; certainly it's bound to provoke some lively after-theater coffee conversation, especially if you or your date is a fan of the book. The reactions of the fan community, and reviewers in general, have been all over the map. Some Adams enthusiasts, including several close friends of his and/or participants in the first BBC radio play version of the story, have proclaimed it to be all the author would have hoped, had he not died of a heart attack on a treadmill in the gym of a Santa Barbara hotel in 2001 (he had a hand in the script before his death). Even some reviewers who have no particular love of the book seem amused. Others, however, don't see what all the fuss is about, saying the movie isn't bad, just not that...
funny. And some hardcore fans have been outraged at what they perceived as a hailstorm of radical plot changes.
There are plot changes, it's true, but they don't amount to much: a couple of extra characters (John Malkovich's Humma Kavula, the heretofore unnamed opponent defeated by Sam Rockwell's Zaphod Beeblebrox in his campaign to become President of the Galaxy, and Anna Chancellor's Questular Rontok, Zaphod's heretofore unnamed vice president and would-be lover - neither of whom matter much in the grand scheme of things), a modified love triangle (between Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, and Martin Freeman's Arthur Dent, the putative protagonist), an added prop (the Point-of-View gun, which zaps one's quarry with a few minutes of seeing things from his attacker's perspective). And anyway, as Adams often said, every version of the
Hitchhiker's universe, from the radio plays to the books to the BBC TV mini-series to this, has been altered to fit its medium; the results are best seen, he advised, as alternate-universe versions of the same basic story.
Adams wrote for, and was clearly influenced by, Monty Python; the sense of humor of the books is wry, subtle, and fairly intellectual if supremely silly. The difficulty of translating that tone successfully to film was one major cause for the length of time it took to get this movie made, and constituted perhaps the main reason many fans of the books feared - or hoped - that a cinematic version would never come to pass. Does it work? In some aspects, yes - but perhaps not surprisingly, it often works best where the filmmakers, U.K. video-meisters Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, A.K.A. "Hammer & Tongs," and co-screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, come up with new, more cinematic whimsies in that same ol' Janx spirit.
The movie opens, for example, with a song-and-dance number, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"
(hear it here), performed by the dolphins of Earth immediately prior to their fleeing our planet, which, being the second-most intelligent Earth species (humans are only the third), they know is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. (If that strikes you as funny, you'll probably like the movie.) Another good example is the handling of the titular Guide itself, a sort of e-book which has been elegantly rendered not only with Stephen Fry's tone-perfect voice-over of the entries, but also with Flash-like animation which does not simply visualize the narration but complements it. The entry on the Improbablity Drive which propels the protagonists' spaceship
Heart of Gold, for instance, verbally describes the Drive's conception as the result of long hours of lonely, thankless work even as it visually depicts its socially maladroit scientist-creators banging on their lab ceiling with a mop handle in anger at a raucous party upstairs - a party of the sort to which, the Guide mentions sadly, they are never invited. (Again, if this strikes you as funny, you'll like the movie.)
But the possibility for such visual additions points up the reason fan reactions can be so all over the map. A lot of the fans who disapprove of the movie seem to do so because the characters and scenes don't look like what they imagined in their heads. (I will allow this was a reaction I shared.) Peter Jackson got around this by bringing in long-time
Lord of the Rings artists to generate conceptual art and design cues for his adaptation of the Tolkien saga, and the result was legions of blissful fans who were treated to the spectacle of already familiar visualizations being brought to life.
The
Hitchhiker's crew couldn't do that, however, for two reasons. One, there is not the same wealth of fan-generated or -approved art out there for Adams's books. Two, Adams himself was not a very visual writer. Read the books again now and you'll be struck by the thoroughly verbal nature of the enterprise (which did, to be fair, start out as a radio play). The physical descriptions are few and far between (contrast them to Tolkien's, which went on for whole chapters at a time). Adams tends to describe things in a manner calculated for humorous value, not visual fulsomeness:
"Space," the introduction to the Guide states,
"is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..."Funny, yes, but if you don't know what outer space looks like beforehand, you're not likely to be able to imagine it more effectively now. And when it comes to things we
haven't seen before - like, say, Marvin the Paranoid Android (voiced by Alan Rickman), one's of Adams's most inspired creations, a robot prototype with personality programming whose demeanor is at once egomaniacal and morose - well, all Adams gives us is the word "android" and the fact of two little red triangular-shaped eyes. The reader has plenty of room to draw in the rest in her imagination, and legions of fans have done just that. (Mine looks like See-Threepio.) Fine and dandy for a book - but when a movie, as it must, fills in all those missing details, the result can be significantly at variance with what the reader pictured.
The filmmakers worsen the situation by frequently changing what little was actually described in the books. The Heart of Gold, which Adams wrote looked something like a giant running shoe, has been rendered here as a giant sphere, for instance. Marvin's eyes, while indeed triangular, are green instead of red, for no apparent reason. That's not such a big deal; that his head has been rendered as another giant sphere in what is either design continuity or a crass attempt at selling Marvin plushies or both, however, is. (Much of the film's design work is, in fact, inspired, but one wonders why the filmmakers chose to depart so freely from what few concrete cues they actually had.)
And then there's the issue of taking characters written as British and turning them into Americans. This seems to bother a lot of fans, particularly in England, and I can understand their pain. The script turns some of these changes into virtues (Arthur, on finding out his friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is not from Guildford, as he has been led to believe, but rather from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse: "Well, that explains the accent..."), and the actors are winning enough that I, for one, was not bothered. Of course I'm American, so as I read the book for the first time at the age of twelve, in my mind, I must confess, so too was Trillian. Ford, being an alien, was kind of fuzzy for me, his bland car-model name somehow connoting the aregionality of TV spokesmen; thus Mos Def jibes okay with the vision in my head. Your mileage may vary.
I always had very specific ideas on Zaphod, however, who is described by Adams as a sort of hippie rock-star type with a megawatt smile and a rather small brain; I used to picture him as a two-headed, Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon. Sam Rockwell, never short on creativity, has made him instead a 70s southern rocker - he would look very much in place onstage with .38 Special - and added a Dubya-esque accent that, while entirely outside Adams's intentions, matches nicely with the character's cluelessness. The resolution of the love triangle in this telling, combined with Rockwell's choices, makes Zaphod less the charming rogue of the books, however, than just an amusing doofus, a change which does not redound to the story's benefit.
By far the most successful characterization belongs to Bill Nighy, who takes Slartibartfast, craftsman of coastlines and a bit of a cypher in the book, and makes of him a living, breathing, slightly befuddled tinkerer who takes justifiable pride in his work. He's like a shy Swiss watchmaker, the latest of a long line of master artisans who derives all his happiness from a well-placed cog, and he somehow embodies the sweetness of Adams's worldview in a way that no one else - not even Freeman as Arthur - manages to do. If there's a sequel, I have one request: more Slartibartfast, please.
One could quibble over this or that detail, but I like forests more than trees, so I won't. My moviegoing companions were split in their reactions; Sweetness & Light, like myself a fan who had not read the books in a long time, was fairly pleased overall, while Big Joe, a newbie, found the whole thing "just not that funny." I feared as much. The handling of the property is so loving and gentle that opportunities for excitement - which are not that plentiful to begin with and thus not to be squandered - are passed by in favor of maintaining the droll, meandering pace and tone of the original prose. The script, while incorporating several bits from
Hitchhiker's sequels, unwisely omits two of the best action sequences from the second book,
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: one, in which our foursome escape the titular restaurant, Milliways, in a stolen spaceship programmed to be autopiloted into a supernova as part of a rock band's reeeeeeeally big stage show; the other, the sequence at Milliways itself, which was part of the original radio play and which plays something like a Vegas show directed by Terry Gilliam as diners protected in a temporal bubble watch the universe end over... and over... and over. This movie could have used the suspense and fun of these sequences, so I'll add to my break-in-case-of-sequel requests: Milliways, Disaster Area, and Hotblack Desiato, please.
Is
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy everything fans have hoped for? I'd have to say no. But it's no worse than the BBC TV show, and better than we had any reason to expect from Disney, the studio where live-action generally goes to die. Props to the Mouse for handing this project to Brits, who understand it best; points off for entrusting it to a director/producer team whose experience is all in commercials and music videos. (Someday some clever studio exec may actually figure out that making a two-hour movie requires a sense of long-form pacing and character that
wunderkinder who've never made a film longer than three-and-a-half minutes simply haven't yet learned. Today, sadly, is not that day.) It's diverting, and yes, it's amusing in places. But it's not definitive, and probably never could be.
For that, you'll just have to read the book. Ain't that always the way?
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