Um… he thought the dominant life form on Earth was a CAR… if he wanted to be inconspicuous, he would have put a Ford logo on his head ;).
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Anyway, just saw it today. Liked it! I’m sorry I missed the part at the end. I knew there was a reason some people were staying around… but I dragged by best friend to go see it, and she… well, didn’t like the books (thought the movie was ok, however). Anyway, I thought the casting was really good. The new stuff was fun, like Vogsphere and the Vice-President… though I wonder:
How did they get everything back the way it was… they can build a planet, but they can’t turn back time!
The Guide entries were great and the Vogons looked perfect.
I think the part that got the most laughs though:
was the yarn bit
Hopefully this movie gets some great extras on DVD, because I’ll be buying :D.
I’m a big fan of the Guide in all its forms. Just got back from seeing it, loved it. There were several moments when the audience was laughing out loud.
I’d say the highlights:
[spoiler]Marvin with the POV gun.
The whale & its ‘landing’
The thing on Vogsphere that slapped you if you had an idea - perfect for a planet of bureaucrats[/spoiler]
I’ll be going back for another look with some friends this week, there is a huge amount of background detail to take in.
Slartibartfast said it was a “backup,” though he didn’t elaborate if the humans on Earth Mk.2 were real humans or simulacra or whatever. It probably wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the mice and/or Magarethans had the technology to do periodic backups of the planet and the program while it was trying to find the Ultimate Question, and after the Vogons blew up the original, they got to work on a restoration.
[quote=EmeraldGrue]
Also from CapAlert:
Since Douglas Adams was an avowed atheist, I think this is the highest compliment you can pay to the movie.
Then why did the mice need Arthur’s brain? If they had a backup, no need for Arthur’s brain. See the dilemma?
[/QUOTE]
Perhaps having such a large computer reboot would require more money than the mice would care to spend. Can you imagine how much power it would take? The electric bill would be staggering@ Why bother if they could just lop off the top of Arthur’s head?
Ah, yes. About that last highlight. Was that something the Vogons made, or just the sort of natural environment that would cause creatures like Vogons to evolve? I rather like the latter idea. Seems like just the sort of thing Adams would’ve come up with
They seemed very alive when Ford was doing his “choke 'em and snap 'em” thing with his towel, so I’m guessing that they’re supposed to be natural. And you’re right, they are a very Adamsian concept.
[spoiler]My take on it was that they subtly diverged from the book on the whole Earth Mk2 issue. In the book, Arthurs brain contained the answer to The Ultimate Question and, if the mouse could have gained access to it, would have meant no need for Earth Mk2.
In the movie, I gathered that they could resume computation on Earth Mk2 but they needed a tiny bit of the previous earth to bootstrap the loading process. Everything about The Question was still stored in a half-computed form in Arthurs brain.
[/spoiler]
I have to say I was disappointed. There’s something about the characterisations I didn’t like. Plus the editing was sometimes horrifyingly bad.
The thing about Simon Jones’s Arthur is that he played it with a kind of neurotic confused urgency that worked for the kind of humorous observations he’d make. But Martin Freeman played him like he was just morose and bored by it all, so the jokes were just dull and flat.
And Zaphod wasn’t cool and smarmy so much as annoying and stupid, and rather a lot of the time apparently in a stoned state. The whole second head compromise was irritating and not funny. And the third arm only makes an appearance once. Or maybe one and a half times.
I did like Trillian, and I did like Ford, and I got used to Marvin even though his voice always sounded like it was coming from nowehere specific. I liked Eddie, your shipboard computer, and Slartibartfast was good characterisation even though his jokes fell a bit flat too. Stephen Fry as the Guide was great, but his dialogue was always word for word the same as in past incarnations so it didn’t make me laugh despite being funny stuff.
And even though they tried to pretend they were keeping it British, as Arthur was really the only one who was actually a Brit in most of the ensemble scenes it was painfully obvious that they didn’t want many Brits involved. In the Deep Thought scene with the group, for example, there were no Brits at all.
I don’t know what should’ve been done to make it better, but I do know that for me it didn’t live up to its potential.
I enjoyed the movie…just enough. I think the material overall just doesn’t resonate with me as much as it used to. I was watching the original BBC TV series and it simply did not match my memories of it in terms of enjoyment. I can’t put my finger on it. I watch old Monty Python and it seems as fresh as ever, but HHGTTG not so much. Still, I did enjoy the movie, didn’t love it but it was good enough with many excellent, humorous parts. I found distracting Marvin’s voice, because it was so identifiable as Alan Rickman, I kept picturing Snape from Harry Potter or Metatron from Dogma. I do absolutely love that theme music, is it available online anywhere?
Saw it yesterday with my brother and sister-in-law and her brother. I thought it was great fun.
Towards the start (after the Vogons make their announcement to all of Earth about what they are going to do) and towards the end there were very brief (may one second long) appearances of a man sitting at what appeared to be a sreet-side table, and I could have sworn the man was Eric Idle of Monty Python. I haven’t yet found anything on the Web that verifies that. Did anyone else notice this? (This man at least looked very much like Eric Idle.)
We know from “Restaurant” that Arthur’s brain did not contain any of the Ultimate Question. Oh, and the answer to The Ultimate Question is 42… they were looking for the The Ultimate Question, not the answer [/nitpick]
Please, what was the point of the “I’m already a woman” line?
I think I may be completely missing something here.
If it meant “women are inherently just as ditzy as Zaphod here” that seems somehow out of keeping with the story as it appears on screen, as well as with anything I can recall from Adams’ works.
Please tell me it meant something else. I liked the movie very much, but that one line kind of fell flat.
