Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre

I saw HHGTTG Thursday night at the Ziegfeld here in NYC. I liked it very much, but I knew I should have been absolutely LOVING it, and wasn't. It was just good enough. That might sound like faint praise, but compared with some other adaptations I've seen, it puts it head and shoulders above many of its peers.

I will say that the first two thirds are much stronger than is the last act. The problem, as I see it, is that HHGTTG is less plot-driven than Hollywood likes its big budget offerings, instead being a string of ridiculous vignettes which are more thematically linked than anything else. So they grafted on the annoying plotline with the Empathy Gun (or whatever the hell it was called) and Zaphod's stalker/vice-president. Malkovich stops being relevant at the end of his sermon, and Trillian gets arrested for no apparent reason, and the whole wrong-headed continuation of the fledgling romance between her and Arthur, which was just a bad move, and was perhaps the most cheapened aspect of the source material. By the time they actually land on Magrathea my amusement had dwindled. The whole sequence where Arthur and Slartibartfast see the planet workshop should have been overwhelming, but it was kind of emotionally flat to me.

That all said, I thought the interpretations of some of the classic gags were inspired, like the manifestations of the Improbability Drive on the Heart of Gold, and the surprise aspect of Zaphod's second head and third arm (which made it all the more frustrating when they come up with a reason to do away with those devices). I also thought that Sam Rockwell's portrayal of Zaphod as a rock n' roll edition of George W. Bush was brilliant, and was not played up nearly enough. Also, Marvin ought to have played a larger role (and that which he plays in the climax feels forced, like the whole climax), though his typically disgruntled reaction to having his arm removed as a gun surrogate was priceless.

Four direct references were made to the TV series, as far as I could tell: the same narrator for the Guide, or at least a soundalike; the theme song for the series plays right after the Earth is destroyed (that's not a spoiler; it's the whole premise of the story); the original Arthur as Magrathea's answering machine (with the added new classic: "Your destruction may be monitored for training purposes") and the original Marvin is on queue on the Vogon homeworld. Also, keep a sharp eye out for a two second cameo by Jason Schwartzman as Zaphod's shrink, delivering the classic line: "Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?"

Perhaps I'm more charitable since I didn't have to pay to see it, and I did have major complaints with it, but all in all it's a far better film than what could have emerged from the Hollywood filmmaking process. So just try to be happy with it, and maybe the DVD cut-scenes will sort out some of the confusion. If we support it, we might see a far superior rendition of Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

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Hitchhikers Film