The Pros and Cons of Hitchhikers

Last night Jimmy Downtown and I went to see Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I went into the theater with great anticipation as I'm a fan of Hitchhiker's in all its guises - the radio series, the books, the video game, and the mini-series. And I like to think that I entered the theater with an open mind, willing to judge the film on its own merits and in its own medium. I'm not sure if I was or not.

This film was terrible - I hated it. It committed the cardinal sin for comedies by not being funny. Look, here's my humor breakdown:

Made me smile: 2 or 3 times
Made me go "heh": 2 or 3 times
Gave me a semi-half-chortle: 1 time

I wanted to like this film, honestly I did. And there was a whole filmic foundation laid down for me to like it. I liked the costumes, the sets/scenery, and the aliens. Things just seemed to be in place for an enjoyable cinematic experience. The problem is that I have a laundry list of things I didn't like about the film. While each one individually wasn't enough to make it a bad film, taken together they formed a gestalt of poor cinema.

As hard-core fans know, the story is called "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" because the story is about the book itself. The radio series says this explicitly. The Guide gives Ford a reason to be on earth, it links scenes, and explains things in funny ways. The film had a paucity of The Guide, in my estimation, and the look of it was too 1950s pastely. Curiously enough, it was an entry from The Guide that provided my lone semi-half-chortle - the entry explaining the Ponit of View gun. Another element given short shrift was the poking fun at corporations. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporations was barely mentioned and gags relating to it seemed to have been thrown out there and left hanging. For instance, the doors sigh but don't talk like they should. Marvin briefly gives a spiel about Genuine People Personalities but the doors have none. They were just personified slightly. The humorous "intellectual" asides in The Guide and most of the jokes which showed that Douglas Adams had a great love of science were all but absent too. Everything was brought down to the lowest common denominator . There were a few scenes in which a computer display shows that normality had been reached but this was never explained, to my recollection. I don't recall that the Improbability Drive was ever elucidated upon. While I, as someone who's hard-core fan, found it fairly humorous that Ford and Arthur should have been turned into couches when being resuced from the vacuum of space, I can't imagine a non-fan having the slightest idea why that should have happened. While it is a reference to the radio series, a simple explanation of the Improbability Drive was all that was needed.

More bitches:

Zaphod was played too much as a stupid, hyper-Elvis. I prefer the egomaniacal version. And he had no humorous witticisms like, "I'm so cool you could keep a side of beef in me for a year". Too much physical Jim Carrey/Jerry Lewis kind of humor and not enough funny dialogue. The love story. The romance between Arthur and Trillian held no interest for me and came across as a purely superfluous Hollywood addition. What purpose did the detour to Vogosphere to rescue Trillian serve? Cut out the romance and keep to the story of them going to find the Question. And why put Deep Thought on Magrathea? It really didn't bother me that much but I didn't understand why the change was made. While Deep Thought looked cool, Helen Miren didn't sound snotty enough for my taste. Either that or make her sound completely disinterested. The Vogons. Not that giving them such a large role was necessarily bad, I got the impression that it was just so they could put shootouts into it. The acting was good for the most part, but I thought that Mos Def's lines in the beginning of the film were delievered flatly. I think he had a great face for the part of Ford, though as he had some great Ford expressions that mixed confusion and omniscience perfectly. Shit, my complaints could go on forever. Instead, let me list the two funny scenes:

1) The scene with Arthur and Ford in the Vogon airlock about to be cast into space. We all think that the door behind them is going to open but instead the floor does. Good bit of misdirection.

2) The Guide's explanation of the Point of View gun. About how it was invented by angry housewives - that was classic DNA material.

I just didn't find the rest of the film to be funny. Although I did appreciate the appearance of the version of Marvin from the BBC mini-series of the story. He's queuing on Vogosphere. Honestly, I was so disappointed that I went home an immediately put on part 7 of the radio series so that I wouldn't be contaminated. Oh, but Zooey Deschanel was hot.