h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My Mom and I went to see this movie this Tuesday. Well ... I'm a bit disappointed. Visually, the film is interesting, but could have been better. I'd have designed them a much better Bandersnatch ... a better Jabberwock too. It bothered me that they called the creature a 'Jabberwocky' ... the name of the *poem* is Jabberwocky; the creature in the poem is called a 'Jabberwock'.

It also bothered me that the queen in the movie is an amalgam of the Queen of Hearts in the first book and the Red Queen in the second book. Two quite different queens.

And the movie made too much sense! The books had no coherent plot and in that respect really were much more dream-like: a rather disconnected series of weird characters and events; the only unifying themes were that of 'playing cards' for the first book, and 'chess' and the 'mirror world' for the second. Whereas for the movie, an overarching plot was cooked up and the characters like the Mad Hatter and so on, actually knew what was 'going on'. In the books, the characters usually had views that had nothing to do with anything going on beyond their own little 'scenes'.

If I had to make a movie 'based on' the books, I would really have made it in the spirit of the books ... interesting nonsense. It would be a nice thing in my view, to make a straight version of the stories, with as much imginative art as possible, emphasising that it was just *one* way of imagining everything. The books have so much in them that can be pictured in myriad different ways.

Yeah, well I think that Tim Burton is in too much of an artistic rut--all of his movies look alike regardless of their content and that gets very old after a while. He is every bit as bad as Disney for not honouring the culture or history behind the story --sh he ends up cheapening it.

An insightful review. I've only seen the trailers, but they were enough to put me off.

I really dislike Tim Burton's films on the whole - for the reasons you've stated. Just as Stanley Kubrick completes twists his sources, destroying the original, Burton takes his sources, reads them resistantly, and produces something else of which he is the auteur. The result is usually annoying.

I make an exception for 'Sweeney Todd' - that's got Sondheim's music in it, and for once his 'usual suspect' actors fit the roles.

I've never seen an 'Alice in Wonderland' that matched the books. Perhaps that is just one story that needs to be read and imagined?

Yeah, well I think that Tim Burton is in too much of an artistic rut--all of his movies look alike regardless of their content and that gets very old after a while. He is every bit as bad as Disney for not honouring the culture or history behind the story --sh he ends up cheapening it.

Sorry D. didn´t mean to be redundent!