www.planetmagrathea.com/shortreview.html
This review is based on a substantially complete version of The Hitchhike r's Guide to the Galaxy shown to a small group of journalists in London on 31st March 2005, to which I was invited by Buena Vista International and Digital Outlook. The generosity of these companies in paying for my travel to this screening is gratefully acknowledged. The opinions expres sed here are the personal critical opinions of myself, author and journa list MJ Simpson. i f any factual details have been misremembered, I am happy to amend those portions of the text.
You just w on't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided atte mpt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intent ioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that's just peanuts to the Hitchhiker's movie. Its bad on a big scale because enormous swathes of the story have been d ispensed with - most of the Guide entries, whole scenes - or changed bey ond all recognition. And it is bad on a small scale because many, many w onderful lines have been cut or in some cases actually rewritten to make them less funny. Whatever your favourite line from Hitchhikers, there s a good chance that it wont be in the film. Even if its really well-k nown, widely-quoted, much-loved, very funny - it will probably be absent from the movie. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good come dy writing is like poetry. It has a meter to it and when you get the rig ht words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will d o Douglas dialogue was perfect. However, the makers of this film, desp ite all their talk of being faithful to Douglas intentions and ideals, have seen fit to piss about with his carefully crafted, wonderfully quot able lines. Im not being met aphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the j okes from the story. There are scenes where all were left with is the s et-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the p unchline. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bo thered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, real ly pisspoor, unfunny jokes; they have replaced them with stupid playgrou nd humour and pointless slapstick. As well as being staggeringly unfunny - and Hitchhikers Guide really is one of the least funny comedy films ever made - the film also suffers by having an entirely nonsensical plot. It is driven by convenience and un explained happenings. Characters just happen to be where they need to be and have what they need to have, even if it makes no sense for them to be there or to have that. Maybe it did make sense at one stage, but the film looks like it has had some heavy re-editing from the version seen i n early previews and test screenings. With a plot that makes no sense, and most of the explanatory Guide entrie s either missing or so heavily cut that they might as well be missing, I fail to see how anyone who wasnt already completely familiar with Hitc hhikers Guide could possibly follow what is going on. And those of us f amiliar with the story will just be incensed at the way that so much of it has been thrown out and replaced with unfunny, pointless crap. Theres no sense of a big crazy universe packed with weird lifeforms that somehow reflects our ow n world. Hitchhikers Guide has always been a Swift-ian satire but the m akers of the movie have decided to ditch all that and replace it with po intless surrealism and crude physical comedy. It doesnt help that Martin Freeman plays Arthur Dent as an annoying litt le prat, that Zaphod has been changed entirely in appearance, character and motivation so that all that is left is his name, and that Ford never gives the impression that he wants to go to a party. Of the Heart of Go ld crew, only Zooey Deschanels Trillian is at all believable and sympat hetic. Bill Nighy is excellent, easily the best thing in the film, but M arvin might as well not be there as almost all of his lines have been de leted or altered. Stephen Fry sounds like Stephen Fry, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz sounds like R ichard Griffiths, and Deep Thought sounds like Helen Mirren really could nt be bothered at all. As for John Malkovich, if he wasnt the movies token star value his scenes would probably have been ditched altogether as they are completely pointless. They set up a subplot which is not onl y never resolved but never even touched on. Some of the new ideas, such as Malkovichs character, were created by Dou glas Adams himself but that doesnt make them good ideas. And perhaps so me of the rewriting was done by Adams too, but thats no excuse. In any case Im quite sure that he didnt very slightly rewrite his dialogue so that it neither flows properly nor generates any laughs. The movie is p acked with little things that will only make sense to fans of the story, but theyre not in-jokes because theyre not jokes. Just mentioning som ething that is meaningless without having read the book does not make it a funny thing, and only serves to confuse those poor sods who have the misfortune to encounter Hitchhikers Guide for the first time in this fo rm. There are quite a few nods to Douglas Adams himself and although these go some way to making up for the almost complete absence of his name from the publicity, surely a better way of paying tribute to this much-loved, much-missed author would be to not fuck about with the sublimely witty dialogue that he sweated blood to create. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie is an abomination. Whereas the radio show, TV show, books and computer game are all recognisably varia tions on a theme, this is something new and almost entirely unrelated. I ts not even a good film if viewed as an original work: the characters a re unsympathetic, the cast exhibit no chemistry, the direction is pedest rian, the pace plodding, the special effects overpowering (lots and lots of special effects, none of them funny mind you) and above all the scri pt is amazingly, mindbogglingly awful. This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep.
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