The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Some novels are seemingly designed to work well as movies. Take Jurassic Park, for example. If ever a story begged to be projected onto a massive screen, it's the story of a theme park filled with dinosaurs run amock. I mean, that's the kind of book that's frustrating just to read, because you don't want to hear about how big the fucking Tyrannosaurus is; you want to see it mauling some children whilst they scream bloody murder from the inside of a mud-encrusted, overturned jeep.

But literature and cinema are such different formats that most of the time, work doesn't translate well from one to the other. I mean, a book that's really fabulous is really fabulous for a reason, and that reason usually has to do with the writing. And though great writing is important to make a good movie, it's only one of many, many ingredients.

And this brings us to Douglas Adams' comic sci-fi classic "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." It's a terrific, fast, fun read, a book I have enjoyed for many years, since I first read it early on in high school. But it's essentially a conceptual novel, a book of ideas, mostly humorous (and, yes, mostly harmless). No movie could really try to capture the idiosyncratic "voice" of Douglas Adams, and director Garth Jennings thankfully doesn't try.

Instead, he takes the bare bones story of "Hitchhiker's Guide," fits in some of the more abstract concepts into brief set pieces, adds in some old-fashioned formula bits like a love triangle and a quest for a firearm, and calls it a day.

The result is a zippy, highly entertaining, decidedly strange and regrettably disjointed adventure movie. And nothing more. It's hardly a classic adaptation, but it's certainly a passably enjoyable science-fiction comedy, and it's likely the best cinematic adaptation of Douglas Adams we're going to get.



If I had to describe the movie in one word, that word would be "faithful." Sure, Jennings and screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick have made some adjustments to the narrative. They pad the role of the female lead, giving her more to do and more motivation. They add in an entire subplot involving John Malkovich as a cult leader that doesn't appear in the novel. And they breeze by a whole lot of philosophical or conceptual material that just wouldn't translate well to the screen.

But for the most part, this is a slavishly faithful translation of Adams' book. If it occasionally feels more like a recreation of a novel rather than a confident and independent feature film, that's probably less a fault of the filmmakers and more an overall difficulty of reworking such iconic and singular material.

The action begins with the destruction of Earth by a horrid race of creatures known as the Vogons (the foul beasts are gorgeously brought to live by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and are some of the best-looking effects in the movie). Mild-mannered toady Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) is saved at the last moment by his pal Ford Prefect (a delightful Mos Def, in his most likable and warm performance to date), whom he has just learned is an alien.

Prefect has been hiding out on Earth as a reporter for a book known as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," which serves as the repository for all knowledge about our vast universe and its inhabitants. So Ford and Arthur proceed to hitchhike around for a while, somewhat aimlessly as it happens, and it's exactly here that the film runs into a problem.

See, movie audiences demand forward motion. They like to see a narrative. And Douglas Adams books are just not about storytelling. As I said, they are about ideas. Very entertaining ideas, yes, and expressed in a funny way, but abstracts nonetheless. Jennings cannily tries to work some of this material into the film by animating selections from the "Hitchhiker's Guide" itself (wonderfully narrated in the film by Stephen Fry). It's a great technique, and it works for a while, but after a time it becomes more of a distraction. Unfortunately, though they're well animated and funny (most of these asides are taken directly from the original novel), again they just aren't cinematic.

So, as I said, this lends the movie a disjointed air. Things become even more haphazard when Arthur and Ford encounter Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), the President of the Galaxy, who has stolen a state-of-the-art spaceship known as the Heart of Gold. The introduction of the Heart of Gold, and the complex device on board that renders the impossible possible, requires a good deal of exposition, and the introduction of Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), a human whom Arthur first met on Earth, further complicates the film.

At this point, the proceedings start to get bogged down and the film's energy never really recovers. I understand why the filmmakers and producers felt the need to establish a romantic relationship between Arthur and Trillian (and romantic complications with Zaphod), but this thin and underdeveloped material takes time away from what was really the heart of Adams' book, which was all about gaining an understanding of the absurdity of the natural world.

There are very interesting and nuanced concepts at play here, ideas about the nature of infinity and the limitations of human understanding, but these concepts are sped past to make way for a more conventional romantic adventure storyline. And that's to be expected. It would take a far more experimental film to do justice to all of Adams' far-out metaphysics, and that sort of movie would never be able to get a budget together to make these sort of visual pyrotechnics possible.

The movie really is a visual wonder. I mentioned the Henson Shop's terrific work on the Vogons, but really all the design in the film is pretty much breathtaking. Of particular note are sequences featuring the Infinite Improbability Drive, which has the power to transmogrify the human characters into couches or animals or balls of yarn. And a late sequence in which Arthur gets a tour of a prototype for the new model of Planet Earth is extremely well-realized. These are not easy concepts to get across using visuals, so the fact that it comes off and works within the reality of the film is a credit to the entire crew.

If I sound disappointed, I'm not, really. This is about all anyone could expect from a movie of this material. It's not like Lord of the Rings, a novel everyone said was unadaptable but which turned out surprisingly well. That was difficult to conceive as a film because of its massive scale. But Hitchhiker's Guide confronts a different problem entirely, the problem of taking a specific author's voice and odd ideology and transforming it into a mainstream, fun piece of light entertainment. It works fairly well, except when it totally doesn't work at all, and I'm not sure the film will have any real longevity. I will admit to enjoying it while it was on, and I'm sure one day I'll want to revisit it to confirm my feelings.