Harmless

The movie adaptation of Hitchhiker's was a lot of fun. (This post is super-lite on spoilers, folks.) A jumbled mess of ideas and sketches held together by a shoestring of a narrative... like just about every other incarnation of the story so far. Unfaithful this is not!

The cast looked great when it was announced and making this film didn't seem to sap their talent any. Sam Rockwell was already halfway to beatification in my house before I saw him in this. He's like all the previous Zaphods on steroids. Mos Def mumbled a lot and, since no-one except Arthur really got any lengthy speeches, it's hard to critique him. But at no time did he feel wrong for the part of Ford.



Martin Freeman is less uptight as Arthur than Simon Jones (all other Arthurs ever) was but, considering how times have changed, Freeman characterised haplessness and hopelessness for the modern age without resorting to a Pyhton-esquye caricature of a repressed colonial. He's really just like his Tim from The Office if Tim's planet was destroyed before he could have his morning cereal. Bill Nighy's Slartibartfast was like Bill Nighy doing a Bill Nighy impression but I'm not sick of him yet so he gets Marcus points too.

The only real disappointments were John Malkovich (he's hardly there) and Alan Rickman (his is a voice-only role and it's not very metallic-sounding for a robot). That bloody dolphin song. Douglas Adams' face at the end. Small critcisms.

A lot of the wordplay from the original scripts has been substituted for sight gags, but the experience is none the worse for it. If you want witticisms, read the book or listen to the original radio shows - they haven't gone anywhere and they're chock full of them:

"It's at times like this, when your planet's been blown up and you're about to get sucked out of a Vogon airlock into the vacuum of space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why? What did she say?"
"I don't know! I didn't listen!!"

If you want new-but-totally-in-the-spirit jokes that make the most of this foray into a new medium, such as the helmet with a built-in lemon squeezer to give your brain a little extra zest or the planetary defences that do nothing until you have an idea how to get around them at which point over-sized fly-swatters spring up out of the ground and slap you in the face so you can't concentrate, then see this.

Finally, thanks to all the H2G2 reviewers who were so attached to the source material that they gave several stinking reviews at RottenTomatoes.com. My expectations were so low that I had the best time. Now who wants to see it again?!