I agree completely with this. Zaphod was the most disappointing part of the whole movie, when compared to the books.
And the relevant quote is
Not exactly a simple concept to convey in film, but if Sam Rockwell could have gotten it, the movie would have been immensely more enjoyable.
The Asbestos Mango walked out, sure, but I fell asleep. It took too much energy to walk out, and the seats were comfortable.
Don’t be offended, my dear. You must embrace the geekiness. Make it your own. Love it. If you care for it properly, one day it will grow into something beautiful beyond your imagination. 
P.S. I’m a geek too. Just not this variety. And I’m not tellin’ which variety I am.
The TV series, not the best adaptation, got Zaphod right. So Rockwell or the director made a deliberate choice to destroy the character. Too bad.
I certainly hope there will be a sequel. I mean, without the survivors of the “B” ark and the Scrabble board, the entire basic concept of the story makes no sense (i.e. why we are the way we are). Still, I felt the film did a credible job of telling the story and was quite entertaining. I sat through its entire running time and never once did I check my digital watch!
I read the book when I was twelve, and enjoyed it. The movie was vaguely disappointing to me: there just didn’t seem to be any there there. Not much of a plot, not much of a conflict, not much in the way of interesting character motivations.
There were some great sequences (the yarn-dolls, the head-on-spider-limbs guy), but they were broken up by tepid absurdism that really did nothing for me.
I remember Adams as being a blade so sharp you didn’t realize you’d been cut until fifteen minutes after the attack: his satire is quiet, subtle, and devastating. This was more like a kleenex spatula.
Daniel
Film is not good for subtlety, IMO. It’s not that you can’t do it, you just can’t do it for a modern American summer blockbuster market.
I have never heard the phrase “opportunity costs” used.
Could you enlighten me a bit? I would guess it means that the studio could have made better use of the money in a more profitable investment (whether pumping it into a different film, multiple films, or getting 1% down at the bank), but I am unsure.
I have discussions on this topic from time to time with a buddy of mine and would like to have another weapon in my arsenal! 
It could have been better, but I really enjoyed it. I even saw it three times. I’m not sure if it flopped, but it went out of theaters real quick around here. I hope thinking the DVD sales will be the real money maker for this one. I think word of mouth is a more effective advertising tool when all a person can sit his friend down for half an hour at his house and just pop the movie in. I’d love a sequel…I just hope they don’t needlessly slice and dice the dialogue next time around.
What?! But…but…this can not be!
I wouldn’t say it flopped, but if it had been up against better movies it very well may have.
I attribute much of its modest success to the fact that the other movies out at that time largely sucked worse.
I think it’ll go down as a flop. I haven’t heard anyone - whether professional reviewer or fan - who was in any way enthusiastic about the movie. What I saw was a bunch of people thinking, “They didn’t screw it up as badly as I was afraid they would have” or a bunch of wishful-thinking Adams fans looking for reasons to like it. The best anyone ever was about it ws lukewarm.
I’m a big Adams fan, and I fell asleep toward the end. I didn’t even stay past the start of the credits, discovering only later that a scene referred to in the book (but involving none of the major characters) appears after them. And I can’t bring myself to have regretted my premature departure. Some people have fingered Zaphod, but I thought his personality was pretty well-done, though he looked wrong without two simultaneously-visible heads. I disagree.
What was most wrong was Ford. The biggest misstep was at the very beginning, the bulldozer scene. In the book, Ford walks over to the construction supervisor, and through twisted, but somehow reasonable-sounding logic, convinces him to lay down in front of his own bulldozers. That’s FUNNY, and it seems like something you’d expect of an alien trying to reason with humans. It sets up a mood that something about the universe is off-kilter…or is it just the way humans have come to look at the universe?
What does Ford do in the movie? He bribes the workers with beer. That’s all. And does very little else in the rest of the movie as well.
From then on, the movie just proves to be less funny than the book or TV series. The unnecessary expansion of the “Great Green Arkleseizure/white handkerchief” joke beat to death a beautiful throw-away one-liner. The quest for the weapon on the Vogon homeworld was boring, the “Vogon bureaucracy” joke again beaten to death. The Deep Thought scenes were robbed of much of what made them funny.
I’m not buying the DVD. Maybe that makes me less of a die-hard Adams fan than some. I also refuse to buy Mostly Harmless.
If Hollywood decides to produce a Restaurant at the End of the Universe movie, I’ll probably see it, because I thought it was the best of the books. But if they don’t, I won’t be heartbroken. To this Adams fan, the Hitchhiker’s movie was a flop.
Interesting that so many people have so different reasons for not liking it.
I personally think Arthur was completely wrong. In every other incarnation, Simon Jones plays him with an explosive anxiety, that the whole universe is just some manic surreal bunch of unlikely madness that seems to be encroaching on him at every step, and he is only barely able to withstand it. Brilliantly played and wonderfully charismatic. We need to be on Arthur’s side every step of the way.
But Martin Freeman played him as though he was a slightly less vocal Marvin, and that life was a misery anyway and gee, isn’t the universe kind of wacky sometimes? Oh well. Ho hum. GAH! So so so wrong! I honestly didn’t give a shit about Arthur, because he was such a bland waste of space. I perferred Trillian as my hero, because she took charge, and had some amount of character.
Not that Arthur should take charge, but he needed some compelling character trait for us to love him, at least.
It’s difficult to get excited - although there were things in the movie I loved - when you get so nervous about whether it’ll be good, and are subject to such a huge amount of fan grousing. It makes you more philosophical about the whole thing.
I’m not sure what Zoe meant when she said the movie was made twenty years too late, but those two observations combine to form my main reason for having a “meh” reaction.
When Adams said, in 1978, that humans were so poorly advanced that they still thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea, that stung. Because in 1978, if you weren’t the guy who invented the latest gadget, or if you didn’t have at least one degree in a hard science, you were indeed clueless. It was a major achievement for most people to figure out how to get their top-loading video player to stop flashing 12:00, and forget about that game on the digital watch.
As such, one of the main themes in the radio play and the novel was Arthur’s mind boggling as he was shown one gadget after another. An electronic book?! Doors that talk?! A machine that’s supposed to give you any beverage in the world…but it only produces sludge?! How outlandish it all was!
Nowadays, though, we do have electronic books, and scores of other gadgets. And you no longer have to be the guy who invented it; you were either raised knowing how to use this stuff, or it’s been dumbed down enough that all you have to do is press a button and choose an option from the pull-down menu. I knew, the minute I saw Arthur with a cell phone, that the, as Zaphod summed it up, “What? I don’t understand. Where’s the tea?” element of his personality would either have to be foreshortened, or dropped entirely.
As for hit-or-flop, too early to tell. Nowadays, the true test is DVD sales. (Ha! Another gadget!)
I know this is a bit belated, but the Ford thing I was complaining about in my previous post just struck me with a perfect analogy -
Just imagine how Tom Sawyer would have been if Tom had merely paid Ben to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence.
That’s what the movie did to Ford.
What? Darnit. I wasn’t a huge fan of the film either, but I would’ve liked to have seen this scene - what is that happens?
I just thought it was a bit too 2-dimensional really… nice enough in it’s way, but no real emotion in it. Ford was rubbish, frankly.
However, Bill Nighy was outstanding in my opinion. Really did the role justice.
Am I right in thinking that part of the explanation of the Babel fish was left out? ie they said how it worked, but not the interesting aside that was in the book and the tv series? Presumably they thought that parts of the audience (particularly in the US) wouldn’t appreciate the proof of God’s non-existence.
The Guilde article on the invasion force that ends up being swallowed by a small dog.
How’d that “l” get in there?
An awful lot of the jokes that were fresh and funny in the radio series and original tv series were really brought to better life in loads of other movies since, and evolved there, so that the bare original ideas - for example Eddie, the shipboard computer - were actually a little bare in the movie. Eddie’s personality, and the whole sighing-door-annoying-contraptions gag, was really done a lot better in different ways in Red Dwarf. The talking toaster of series 1 (which showed up later on as well) did a lot more with the gag. It matured the humour somewhat.
Do you see what I mean? Just having an annoying onboard computer isn’t all THAT funny, unless you do it EXACTLY the way Adams wanted, in which case it’ll be funny because HE was funny. If you just take the idea and do it your own way, well, why bother? You might as well crowbar in a romantic comedy angle and go on about the Vogons for ages. Oh, you did…
It’s not that they shouldn’t have changed it. They should have got better writers to change it.
I have a packet of Terry’s Chocolate Orange Segments for the first person to release a big budget version of a beloved classic without insisting on adding snogging. Snogging is the tartrazine of the modern movie. It seems like a harmless added ingredient, but when the film turns out to be really annoying and hyper, you know exactly where to look. Alright, bad metaphor.
A sad movie, really. I didn’t feel Arthur was all THAT bad. Ford was kind of less intelligent somehow. The chaotic, hitching-by-the-seat-of-his-pants side of him came out much more, though. And I LOVED the hug after he tells Arthur the world’s been blown up.
Trillian was totally cute, but in a reasonably annoying way. Maybe she’s supposed to actually be attractive but this was neatly sidestepped in the BBC version by making her heartstoppingly irritating. Of course I shouldn’t have been surprised when the romantic comedy stuff showed up.
Zaphod was great except for the heads, which we won’t go into, because I’m sure the internet is already creaking beneath the weight of horrified posts on that one.
Marvin. Small. Didn’t really understand why. I thought the BBC version was endearingly clunky.
All the extra plot about the Vogon planet was totally incomprehensible to me. Painful and insulting.