Movie Review: The Hitchhiker's Guide

Oh, hey. Spoiler alert.

I was a little bit worried about this movie. I knew that Douglas Adams had originally penned the screenplay, but I also knew that after his untimely death in 2001 it had been handed off to someone else and had since gone through a certain number of rewrites. How much of Adams' original screenplay came through in the end, I thought, was going to be a crucial factor in the movie's success - but there was a problem with that idea as well, because The Guide has been different (and often self-contradictory) in all of its various incarnations. So how does one tell which new "changes" came from the mind of Adams and which ones came from somewhere else? Hmm. So yeah, even though I was completely stoked about it, there was still a bit of trepidation there.

In the end, my feelings on the film are a bit vague and undefined, because there were a lot of highs and a lot of lows. More highs than lows, I thought, and I left the theater having laughed a lot, but I do have some issues. Maybe I'll do a sort of pro-con thing here to get some of my feelings sorted out.

PRO: Zaphod. Marvin. Slartibartfast. John Malkovich as Humma Kavula. A large majority of the cast, for that matter.
CON: Mos Def just wasn't Ford enough for me - it was a very nice effort, however, so I wonder if maybe that wasn't just a directing issue rather than an acting issue. He spent too much time being more scenery than character. Trillian didn't really do it for me, and Arthur... well, let's mention Arthur a bit later.

CON: They left out something that, to me, is absolutely essential to the whole experience, and that's the wondrously full explanation of the magically useful object that is the towel.
PRO: Ford actually uses his towel. Constantly. For all sorts of things. I would have liked the Guide entry, but they did a great job showing instead of telling.

PRO: I really liked the new directions the story went in, and there was (in my opinion) a pretty perfect mix of the new and the old. There were plenty of times where I was reciting along with the movie in my head, but there were also plenty of times where didn't know what was coming.
CON: One last rewrite, although possibly erasing a bit more of Adams' stamp on the project, might have also allowed them to fix an overly large number of plot holes and loose threads. The Humma Kavula/Zaphod storyline was a mess, and in the end it was left completely unresolved. I know why the mice needed Arthur's brain even though they had Trillian right there, but people who aren't familiar with the source materials probably had no idea. And if I get started on these I'm not going to stop, so let's move on.

PRO: A lot of reviewers panned the film for "lacking focus" or for having an "incoherent plot" some other phrase that essentially means the same thing. Which just tells me that a lot of reviewers have no idea what the hell they're talking about when it comes to The Guide, because I defy anyone who's familiar with any of the Guide's incarnations to call them "focused" or "plot-driven." They're all wonderfully zany and random, and the movie is no exception.
CON: This one's hard to put into words, but... I guess I can come closest to it by saying that, in the end, it just didn't have enough heart. Or soul. Or something. I think that the Lord of the Rings movies succeeded so well (in my personal opinion as well as commercially) because you could plainly see that everyone from Peter Jackson on down had poured everything they had into their creation. I didn't get that feeling from The Guide. That's not to say that I don't think they really tried, because you can tell (at least from an acting point of view) that they did, but there was just something lacking in the end.

PRO: Arthur Dent was perfect.
CON: Until the end, where they screwed it all up. The entire point of Arthur Dent is that he's a fish out of water! He's supposed be confused. He's supposed to keep screwing things up. He's supposed to be a befuddled Englishman who couldn't get it right to save his life. The sudden metamorphosis into "Arthur Dent, Hero" was really hard to swallow - epecially when combined with the overly happy ending.

And so on and so forth... I'm going to give it three and a half popcorn boxes out of five, because I did enjoy myself and I'm a bit of a geek about these things ("geek," not "fanboy," which means I'm willing to overlook some of my issues to a certain degree rather than spending the next four months bitching on message boards), but I really should probably only give it three. If they make The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I don't doubt that I'll be waiting in line - but without Douglas Adams around to be involved in the process, I'm thinking maybe they'd be better off just leaving it alone from here on out.