The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
Directed by Garth Jennings

Film Review

Ten years in the making, the film version of Douglas Adams' cult radio series and novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy finally made it to the big screen, although it's a moot point as to whether it was worth the wait.  Chock full of special effects and structured as a bog-standard Hollywood adventure movie, with actors that bear not even a passing resemblance to their counterparts in the radio series, the film has little of the quintessentially British eccentric charm of Adams' original creation and virtually all of the humour falls flat.  Adams himself is credited with writing the screenplay for the film, which went into production a few years after his death in 2001.  Whilst one or two of Adams' additions are inspired (the Point-of-View gun and the queuing gag), others merely dilute what was already there, and the removal of some crucial exposition makes the film hard to follow for those who are not familiar with the previous incarnations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Structurally the film is a mess, as contrived, muddled and prone to random digression as the radio series, but whilst the rambling format worked well on radio, it merely creates tedium and confusion on the big screen.  Trying to make sense of the cobbled together ending (which does a good impression of an explosion in a spaghetti factory, with plot strands left dangling all over the place), is like having your head ripped open by a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, but without the pleasantly diverting sense of intoxication by brain implosion.  What Adams did well in his radio scripts and subsequent novel was to establish his characters and make them believable and likeable; this the film fails to do, and so we have a collection of pointlessly zany individuals that we are expected to engage with when we have no idea who they are or where they come from.   Martin Freeman, Mos Def and Sam Rockwell are a very poor substitute for Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern and Mark Wing-Davey, and convey none of the relish and eccentricity that the original radio series cast bought to the concept and on which Adams' off-the-wall humour depends.

Another area of contention is the special effects, which saturate virtually every scene and reduce much of the film to a mindless spectacle of CGI wizardry.  The effects may have impressed some critics and audiences when the film was first screened in 2005 but already they look dated and unconvincing.  The only effects that still hold up are the design of the Vogons (which curiously resemble the actor Robert Morley) and the book itself, which is admirably well-voiced by Stephen Fry (a worthy replacement for the late great Peter Jones).  If half as much though and effort had gone into the casting and screenwriting as went into the effects, this could have been something quite special, a truly inspired revision of Adams' quirky sci-fi masterpiece.  Instead, it is showy, confused and stale, having barely a tenth of the charm, inventiveness and wonderful lunacy of the classic radio series.  Douglas deserved better than this.  How would he have summed up the film? Mostly harmless.

© James Travers 2011

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