Here's Why

Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy movie

It was fun, the casting was good, the FX were appropriate most of the time, and had a lot of the spirit of the original, but as Iain noted, you can see the point at which Douglas Adams died. There were Hollywood-pleasing additions to the the story that he wouldn't have approved of like inserting a plot device about a magic gun, and changing the ending so that the story didn't make sense. The extended Busby-Berkley opening musical number time could have been used for some of the plots and jokes they left out of the script. I could also see that Douglas Adams had to fight with the Americans about Zaphod's second head, and the parts of the script explaining the tea and towel gags were badly edited out so that the parts left in made no sense. The extra plots and characters were badly realized as well. As far as I could tell, the woman working with the Vogons was just there to make sure there was an extra female presence in the film, so it wouldn't be "too blokey". After going to all the trouble of casting Brits for British roles, they force them to say "Zee", because the American market has already complained about foreigners ruining their English. If you've never heard the radio series, read the books or seen the TV series, you'll have a fun ride, but you won't understand what was supposed to have happened, and you certainly won't understand why there's a cult following.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Science, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, research assistant, Cisco CCNA tutor, Physics laboratory demonstrator, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to freelance writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Diffusion radio science show on radio 2SER 107.3FM Monday at 6:30pm in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Diffusion podcasts. You should follow me on twitter, here

Posted by iwoolf at April 28, 2005 11:24 AM