The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (idea)

To begin with, let me say that I am no Douglas Adams fanboy. Sure, I read most of his books in my youth, and enjoyed them, but by now I can only barely remember the plots, let alone quote passages from memory like some people I know. I'm telling you this so that you won't think it's just fanatic devotion, brooking no deviation from the original text, at play when I say that this movie fails.

In fact, I would argue that the movie fails in large part because it tries too hard to remain true to the books. Think about it: movies are relatively short experiences meant to be consumed in one sitting, without breaks. As a result, they mostly must focus on a single conflict, illustrating how the protagonist(s) overcome a problem, and how the experience in turn changes them. Over all, they are an audiovisual medium, which means that feeling, intention, motivation, and other internal character aspects must be expressed through the outward actions and dialogue.

In contrast, The Hitchhiker's Guide is about a bunch of people, essentially stock comic types who undergo little personality development, who wander around fairly randomly for quite some time, often moving from one scene to another by pure chance, experiencing a lot of things which neither especially help nor hinder their quest. They don't accomplish much, and eventually discover that the thing they are searching for - the authoritative Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything - doesn't exist. They are mostly there to serve as foils for the book's excellent sense of humor, usually based less around laugh-out-loud situations per se as its consistent use of irony, dry wit, and quirky phrasing.

Surely you can see the problems here, and apparently so did the filmmakers, for the script, which Karey Kirkpatrick modified from Adams' adaptation, changes some elements around to make the story less of a picaresque. These changes, however, are hamhanded and worse, ineffective. Yes, the Heart of Gold is now being pursued by the Vogons, but the "worst marksmen in the galaxy" rarely seem all that much of a threat, and mostly remain tangential to the rest of the movie, showing up where and when narratively convenient. They can end a scene, inspiring the crew to move on, but they can't really start scenes, having little effect on exactly what and where they move on to. Adams even created a new character - sneeze-based cult leader and electoral rival to Zaphod Humma Kavula - for the movie, but Kavula's sum contribution is to remove Zaphod's second head and issue him a fetch quest to somewhere he was going anyway, after which point the character never returns.

In the absence of much of a main plot arc, it seems to have been decided that it is Arthur and Trillian's job to make up the difference by falling in love. This subplot is astounding in its inconsequence: by the time they meet on the Heart of Gold, the two characters have already known and flirted with each other before, and get along fine, while Zaphod, the nominal competitor for Trillian's hand, rarely seems to acknowledge her. When the time comes for the inevitable declaration of love, we simply haven't been given enough setup for it to pay off either as a climactic moment or as an organic outgrowth of the characters' (nonexistent) development. It doesn't even advance the plot, but simply seems to have been highlighted out of a sense of obligation.

Well, like I said, the story was never the book's strong point, so how about the comedy? Again, the transition from the book to the movie did not come off well. A lot of it is that a lot of the book's humor was tied to the textual form, and simply can't be expressed through visual images. The film cheats a bit by narrating a few choice passages from the Guide, distracting the audience with animated illustrations that look something like the bastard offspring of an airplane safety card and an iPod commercial. These segments are fun and clever, the animation coming off well even when compared to Rod Lord's already solid sequences for the BBC miniseries, but you can't build a movie out of them.

Sometimes the visual nature of film isn't just uncomplimentary, but actively works against the gags. A Vogon poetry recital doesn't look that bad up on screen, which eliminates much of the tension of the scene, and undercuts the humor of Arthur's forced praise. Likewise, a whale contemplating existence as it falls through the atmosphere is funny precisely because it is so absurd. Presenting it as a realistic, computer-generated sequence complete with voiceover makes the idea more tangible and thus less absurd. The half-minute or so dedicated to this sequence is both too long to sustain humor on premise alone and too short to get anything out of the whale's philosophizing, while the constant reminder of the approaching ground reduces the impact of the tonal shift that is the joke's inevitable conclusion.

The filmmakers might have compensated for losing this text-bound humor by enthusiastically dedicating themselves to the visual. There are two brief sequences that show that the filmmakers did know how to do this right - one, early on, portrays the Infinite Improbability Drive's side effects through the use of, um, yarnmation, while another, where the crew must run through an area inhabited by animated shovels that whack them in the face whenever they have an idea, represents exactly the kind of physical comedy where film has an edge on text. However, the rest of the movie seems marked by a curious aversion to going over the top. Perhaps the filmmakers avoided doing so in fear of accusations that they had dumbed down Adams' humor into silly "gimmicks", but whatever the case, the movie suffers for it.

All in all, I fear that those responsible for the film placed too much emphasis on reproducing the book. Most of the major set pieces and plot points remain, but are diluted by the necessity to keep moving to get them all in before the movie ends. The humor comes too rarely, as the film spends more time setting up exposition that doesn't really pay off, and when it does come it too frequently underwhelms, in large part due to the lack of regard to the nature of the medium. Characters like Ford and Questular hang around even though they have nothing to do, while others like Marvin, limited by the form to plodding and whining, actively suck energy from the film. Even where the film creates new material, as in the Guide's animations or the "Point of View gun", an invention which forces its wielder's outlook upon its targets, thus giving characters an excuse to deliver (each other's) monologues on what they are feeling, it seems to be doing so as a way to insert the book's literary sensibility into the film, rather than adapting the book to the new medium.

In consequence of all this purism, the movie becomes buried under its own weight and eventually collapses. Is it even possible to do a Hitchhiker's movie "right"? I'm not sure, but I know that to even be in the same ballpark would require some pretty deep and painful cuts, which would alienate a lot of the fans of the book. Keep in mind that when I call the movie "failed" I'm speaking from an artistic perspective - all this might well be an acceptable tradeoff from a business standpoint, if the accuracy drives dedicated fans of the book to buy the DVD, which is where all the money is these days.

What I think would have been a better idea, one that given all the forms this story has taken I'm surprised nobody's tried, is adaptation as a cartoon series. The disjointed, episodic narrative and minimal character development are a perfect match for television conventions, and at a conversion rate of one book per thirteen-episode animation season, the show would have enough time to explore each situation fully, wringing out all the humor before moving on. The animated format would allow for the depiction of even the most absurd or grandiose images without an excessive effects budget, and enable the visual exaggeration the material calls for. We can hope.