Early review - Hitchhiker's movie is beyond horrible

[Tuckerfan]

@Shirley Ujest

You must have missed the notices. Everyone ignores them at the council building, posted in the basement.

If this movie is a bust, it will end up being a great drinking game somehow.

In other news:

I am curious about this/these HHTTG audio tape(s). Is there only one or several different ones ? Is one better than another? Is it an ensemble peice or what? Links need!

Thanks!

BBC radio production.

[Colophon]

I got to page 2, where the very first line reads as follows:

The Heart of Gold ends up on the planet Viltvodle (not Viltvodle VI, as in previous versions)

I think you get the gist of the level of his complaints. :rolleyes: <-- (thank God this guy’s back)

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@even sven

Sounds like fanboy whineing to me by a kid that has no understanding of the film medium. Any review that includes a list of things left out can be easily dismissed as fanboy whineing. I’d like to see if his ten hour word-by-word remake is any better.

.

What RobuSensei said. Based on that I’d say this critic’s views on HHGTTG have a great deal of validity, and he doens’t appear to be a 28-year-old geek living in his parents’ basement. Sure the film medium is different, but if you were making a film of Hamlet, would you throw out the ghost scene, the soliloquy, and Ophelia’s mad scene and then, when the fans and critics justifiably cavil and carp, say that they just don’t understand the film medium?

[smiling_bandit]

but if you were making a film of Hamlet, would you throw out the ghost scene, the soliloquy, and Ophelia’s mad scene and then, when the fans and critics justifiably cavil and carp, say that they just don’t understand the film medium?

I wouldn’t, but I can see some filmmakers doing so. No two version of the same production are the same, and I can see someone removing those specific scenes, or changing the meanings, without fundamentally destroying the story. In any event, Shakespeare wasn’t the only one who wrote the Hamlet tale.

More to the point, that isn’t exactly what this guy is talking about. His review is all full of pointless details that no one, not even Adams, would have cared about.

[Rayne_Man]

Regarding the radio tapes. I have a set I recorded directly off-air during the original broadcasts and one I bought from the BBC. There are very slight differences. The most famous one is the omission of the Pink Floyd track . Marvin hums this on the original but not the bought one.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Shirley Ujest

You must have missed the notices. Everyone ignores them at the council building, posted in the basement.

Note: They’re in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavoratory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the leapord”.

Bring a flashlight and rope.

Stranger

[CrazyCatLady]

Oh, have the lights and the stairs gone again?

[CrazyCatLady]

@kaylasdad99

But that’s just it. In my head, that’s precisely what he looked like.

Exactly. I’m having a hard time getting behind a Marvin who looks like that dog from the old Warner Brothers cartoons. Droopy, I think his name was.

[WhyNot]

OMG! Whiney fanboy shut down the Planet Magrathea website instead of facing criticism of his criticism like a man!

From his final whine: " I may occasionally lurk on Hitchhiker’s Guide-related sites or forums if I’m bored, but as of now I will never write another word, in print or on-line, about Douglas Adams or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy."

Rember the good old days, when men were real men, women were real women, and movie critics were real movie critics who didn’t run away when their idiotic reviews were taunted by millions of people on electronic fora?

Sod off in peace, MJ Simpson.

[Maus_Magill]

@Spectre of Pithecanthropus

Sure the film medium is different, but if you were making a film of Hamlet, would you throw out the ghost scene, the soliloquy, and Ophelia’s mad scene and then, when the fans and critics justifiably cavil and carp, say that they just don’t understand the film medium?

Bad analogy. Adapting a play to a film is fundamentally different than adapting a book to a film[1]. In the former about all you have to go on is the dialog, so the adaptors tend to add when they move it to a film medium. In the latter, if the author is any good, there is much, much more than dialog, and the adaptor is left with the unenviable task of having to cull material (some of which may be considered essential) to make the work fit the film and to preserve the essence of the book.

I sincerely hope the Hitchhiker’s movie is able to do that half as well as LOTR.

[1] Yes, I know the radio play came first, but the book is what most people remember first.

[msmith537]

Some new clips are online:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/thehitchhikersguidetothegalaxy.html

The whale bit is pretty funny. “…I think I’ll call it ‘ground’…I wonder if it will be friends with me”.

[Skywatcher]

@Spectre of Pithecanthropus

@even sven

Sounds like fanboy whineing to me by a kid that has no understanding of the film medium. Any review that includes a list of things left out can be easily dismissed as fanboy whineing. I’d like to see if his ten hour word-by-word remake is any better.

What RobuSensei said. Based on that I’d say this critic’s views on HHGTTG have a great deal of validity, and he doens’t appear to be a 28-year-old geek living in his parents’ basement.

From the farewell address:

Although those people who took the trouble to read my long review were, in the most part, extremely complimentary about my analysis and as dismayed as I am about the route that the film has taken, they have unfortunately been drowned out on many discussion boards and forums by people who refuse to accept even the possibility that something connected with Hitchhiker’s Guide may not be perfect.

“May not be perfect”? Damn, man, you made it out to be a piece of crap, not “imperfect”!

Sounds like sven’s view is more accurate than Spectre’s and RobuSensei’s.

[unclviny]

Based on the trailers and the commercials I’ll be saving my money. It looks like they have turned the HHGTTG into an average (read shitty) Hollywood action movie in the meantime it looks like they have sucked all the “quirkyness” out of it and for me the “quirky” factor is the attraction.

Unclviny

[TellMeI_mNotCrazy]

I’ll be going. I actually refuse to read the review beyond the first couple of paragraphs - or any other review. If it’s bad, it will be bad, and so be it. I have dropped 10 bucks on worse things.

The fact of the matter is, no movie will ever, ever live up to my dreams for the perfect Hitchhiker movie. Hell, even if DNA were alive and well and directing the movie himself, I don’t think he could do justice to the books in movie form. Some things just don’t translate onto the silver screen. But I’m willing to drop a few bucks to see if the movie is entertaining, even if it turns out to be not as faithful to the books as I’d like.

[stately_plump_buck_mulligan]

There are a couple reviews up on Rotten Tomatoes. Neither of them particularly scream “disaster” to me. There’s also this glowing AICN review.

Not panicking.

[rjung]

Can’t connect to the new clips (on a Windows XP machine, even), but if the whales and petunias are in the movie, that’s a hopeful sign IMO.

[Skywatcher]

@unclviny

Based on the trailers and the commercials I’ll be saving my money. It looks like they have turned the HHGTTG into an average (read shitty) Hollywood action movie in the meantime it looks like they have sucked all the “quirkyness” out of it and for me the “quirky” factor is the attraction.

From the first Rotten Tomatos review:

Some reviews are just plain awkward to write, especially if you’re a fan reviewing a new iteration of your chosen obsession. I’ve read Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker books, got the TV adaptation on DVD, read the comic book, played the computer game, have all the different versions of the original radio show pretty much memorized, and even have a commemorative towel or two hidden away somewhere. And I loved this film!

But it’s so easy to start this kind of review by saying how much you loved it, then spend five paragraphs picking out all the faults and problems, and then ending limply with a final ‘but I loved it anyway!’ and everyone who reads the review gets the impression it’s a dreadful film.

In short - it’s hard reviewing something you really care about.

So let’s begin with a list of just some of the wonderful things about the film, to set the right tone:
[ul]
[li]The casting is superb, with every single person suiting their parts quite magnificently.[/li][li]Yes, even Mos Def.[/li][li]The effects are bogglingly good.[/li][li]Stephen Fry replaces the late Peter Jones with aplomb and class (although I still would have preferred Oliver Postgate).[/li][li]Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent, has a cameo.[/li][li]The TV Marvin android appears too.[/li][li]The animations accompanying the Guide’s entries are funny and clever.[/li][li]We got given free towels at the screening, which isn’t strictly relevant to this review but I thought it was nice anyway.[/li][li]Most of the new material fits seamlessly into the H2G2 world, especially the excellent sequence where we visit the Vogsphere.[/li][li]The new romance between Arthur and Trillian is actually quite charming, and although his final declaration of love feels a bit shoehorned in it’s hard to think anything but lovely fluffy thoughts when the radiant Zooey Deschanel is on screen being gorgeous.[/li][li]The Divine Comedy sing the closing theme song.[/li][li]It just feels right, like this is a film Adams would have liked and been proud of; that indefinable quality of tone or spirit is intact.[/ul]The final image of the whole film is Douglas Adams’ smiling face. I got a bit choked up at that point, I admit it.[/li]
So let it be known, I loved this film. It’s faithful, irreverent, fun, funny and in no way the disrespectful waste of celluloid Adams fans had secretly been dreading.

Now, the nitpicking, all of which is, be warned, minor:
[ul]
[li]The new material featuring John Malkovich goes absolutely nowhere and doesn’t really add much to the film. It feels like the dangling thread of an abandoned storyline.[/li][li]Just what is Anna Chancellor’s character doing?[/li][li]I think some coherence has been sacrificed in pursuit of pace. Some things that I understood may not have been instantly apparent to a viewer new to this world. For example, we never find out why the pan-dimensional beings want Arthur’s brain. I know, because it’s in the book, TV series and radio show. But it’s not explicitly stated here, and that’s a mistake. Given that the film actually feels a little too short, surely a few more lines could have been left in to make things clearer every now and then.[/li][li]Ford is a bit underused.[/li][li]One of the joys of the radio show is Adams’s pleasure in twisting language into all sorts of new and amusing shapes. Much of that delightful wordplay is lost here, and some of the Guide entries are truncated so that they provide information but not laughs, but I suppose that was inevitable.[/li][li]The film just kind of ends. It doesn’t feel like there’s been a big climax, really. Then again, given that Adams concluded the first book where he did simply because the deadline had run out and he handed in everything he’d written so far, I suppose that’s strangely fitting.[/ul][/li]The radio shows sort of felt as if they were all being made up as they went along, and there are points where this film feels much the same. This may be considered a fault in most films, and will almost certainly provoke a few sniffy reviews, but here it feels in keeping with the source material so that’s fine.

Essentially, then, the flaws you find here, although not exactly the same, are the same kind of flaws you would have found in the radio shows and books. Which somehow contributes to the sense of rightness that the whole exercise manages to summon up.

And the things that are right about this film are legion.

If you’ve never encountered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before then this is as good a version as any to use as your introduction, and you’re in for a treat. And if you love this film as much as you should, then go out and track down the original radio show, because there’s more, much more, where this film came from.

The nitpicks certainly explain why MJ Simpson has a problem with this movie; they’re not nits to him.

[Skywatcher]

Interestingly, the second review says “[t]he film feels like a collection of small, high-energy comedy scenes…” Monty Python, anyone?

[SolGrundy]

@Chronos

For that matter, I also haven’t heard too many folks who didn’t like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings because it diverged too much from the book. Yes, there are plenty of people (like myself) nitpicking the movies, but most of those people (including myself) will readily admit that we liked them anyway.

You “like them anyway,” even though they show ELVES AT HELM’S DEEP, which is completely unacceptable and totally against Tolkien’s master vision? Pah! Pah, I say!

[Chronos]

Of course there were elves at Helm’s Deep; Tolkien himself says so. There were just a few more of them in the movie. But we digress.

And I can’t get the new clips to work, either. It tells me “Click here after installing the plugin”, but it doesn’t even say what plugin I need.