The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

First, I must say that I am a huge fan of these books. For anyone else that is a Hitchhikers fan, that provides some frame of reference, for those who are not fans, let me explain.

With each type of media that the story has been delivered in, from the radio series, to the television series, the books and now the movies, there are differences depending on what the author, Douglas Adams, felt that he wanted to get across at that particular moment in time. From the interviews and articles that I have read, it seems that he had many different possible plot lines and outcomes from the whole story, but the core of the story always remains intact.

So for me the books are my favorite version of the story.

On to the movie. I don’t know that there are many spoilers here, but be warned that I might slip one in. Just thought it would be fair to warn, as I hate when people spoil a movie that I want to see.

Overall, I generally liked it. Not as much as I hoped that I would, but I did like it. I thought that seeing more of the interaction between Arthur and Trillian was interesting. From the books point of view, it seemed that she was not really interested in Arthur at all, or at least very little, where in the movie she was interested, but didn’t like his hesitation to go on an adventure. When Zaphod enteres the scene and asks her if she wants to see his space ship, the adventerous side of her takes over and she leaves the party with him, something that she seems to genuinly regret later in the movie.

As for the plot and “sequence of events” modifications, my advise is just to deal with them. There are some things that work in a book that don’t work on film. The only thing that struck me as odd was on Vogsphere, when they were walking to the “buildings” and they had an idea, they were attacked by a flyswatter type of creature that lived underground. I don’t know where this came from, it could have come from Mr. Adams himself, but it didn’t seem to work well on the screen. It seemed a little too “three stooges” and less Hitchhikers Guide. That is a great example where something was probably very funny written in Mr. Adams unique style that is lost when shown in a movie.

One last thing would be Zaphod. It would have been really nice if they hadn’t done the stacked heads thing. I would have much prefered to see both of his heads present on his shoulders at all times. Same with his third arm. This is nitpicking, but it’s what I think, so there.

Overall a great movie. Would I have done things differently? Sure.

The day that I am a director and get to make those kinds of decisions, I will do so. Since I am not, and probably will never be, I will take what has been done. I think it’s better to have the movie as it was done than to have no movie at all.

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