Awix's Glittering Casket of Noteworthy Pop-Cultural Ephemera
Created | Updated May 11, 2005
Mostly Pointless
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of the irregular review feature that's proven to be even more irregular than I'd anticipated it might. As you may have noticed from the blanket media coverage, cinemas worldwide will this summer be hosting a long-awaited quasi-science-fictional epic, the subject of a huge fan following since the phenomenon originally manifested in the late 1970s. But that's enough about the new Star Wars, let's look at the Hitch Hiker movie instead1.
I am, I am happy to confess, a bit of a collector. I suppose you could say I am the worst sort of collector as I tend to prize completism over discrimination. The practical upshot of this is that I have every series of Babylon 5 on tape rather than just the middle three and have been known to fork out far too much money for pieces of old tat 'just to get the set'. Sometimes, when I'm in pursuit of something, I forget exactly why it is I want it in the first place and what good it will do me when I eventually get my hands on it.
What, you may be asking, has any of this to do with the Guide movie? Well, I can't help thinking that something similar went on here. DNA's determination to get this movie made has been much commented upon, and the lengths he went to in pursuit of his dream are similarly well-documented. And here it is, possibly the world's first blockbuster adaptation of an English radio comedy. Great. It's doing good box office, adding to the DNA legend. Even better. But is doing a movie of the Guide actually a good idea?
Well, we enjoyed it, in a quite-amusing-occasionally-laughing-softly-out-loud sort of way. Some good sight gags and one-liners scattered about. I particularly liked some of the production design; the more Terry Gilliamish it got the more I liked it - although the Guide graphics were a bit of a letdown, lacking the style and wit and invention of Kevin Davies' animations for the TV show. A solid performance from Martin Freeman and an okay one from Sam Rockwell, even if Zooey Deschanel and Mos Def seemed a bit bland. I was quite amused by the way Bill Nighy was able to put all his usual quirks and tics to use in a fairly unusual context as Slartibartfast. But, on the whole, as much as I enjoyed parts of it enormously (the woolly bit, the majestic 'Journey to the Sorcerer'-accompanied sequence) it seemed to me that the original nature of the Guide was too far compromised in its journey to the big screen.
This movie basically boils down to covering the first book of the series, or (if you prefer) the first four episodes of the TV and/or radio show. Given how much the various incarnations of the Guide differ from each other it's more than a bit fatuous to start complaining that the movie doesn't stick to the plot (plot? which one?) but it still seemed to me that the Humma Kavula and Vogsphere sequences were a bit superfluous - the same goes for the sequence in and around Deep Thought with the POV gun (another fairly obvious plot McGuffin partly excused by its being crucial to one the best gags in the picture). The meandering picaresqueness of the Guide doesn't really lend itself well to a non-stop two-hour three-act structure, and attempts to give it a bit more narrative focus and drive like the gun, the central love-triangle and the relentless Vogon pursuit (I never really quite understood what was going on there, but no doubt someone will tut and slowly and carefully demonstrate to me just how moronic I am) didn't quite gel with the tone of the original story.
Some of this survived, I thought, despite the film's bend-me-shape-me-anyway-you-want-me approach to the original material. This struck me as very odd indeed, in that many of the best gags appeared bereft of their original punchlines, and thus lacked most of their impact (f'rinstance, the babelfish section and the circumstances surrounding the odd nomenclature of Ford Prefect), while other throwaway jokes were over-elaborated to a quite startling degree - the running gag about Vogon crabs, the song and dance accompanying the titles, Ford's towel obsession, and so on. There was a distinct sense of some of these jokes having greatness imposed upon them.
But, above all else, the script - for all that DNA apparently wrote most of it - changed the tone of the story, and not for the better. In every other version of the story the central theme concerns how utterly pointless life is, how cruelly absurd the universe can be, and how happiness can only come from an appreciation of the moment you happen to be living in. To be fair the movie captures a smattering of this, but by installing a happy ending (Earth is restored, and Arthur gets Trillian and a spirit of adventure!) and hijacking the mice and the Ultimate Question just in order to inflict some sub-romcom dialogue on the audience, the Guide - for me anyway - was fundamentally emasculated.
I am honestly quite surprised at the mostly positive response this movie has received (judging from the reviews in the Post last week, anyway). I don't think this is actually a bad movie, I just don't think it comes close to doing justice to the originality and verve of the source material. Still, now we can relax: we have the set. Superficially, it's the Hitch Hiker movie we've been waiting for all these years - or a close facsimile. And while it's true that some great stories don't make great movies without significant surgery, I still think the Guide could have been filmed without completely skewing its tone and style. We'll probably never know now. Shame.
