Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Through all these different incarnations, H2G2 -- that's what the cool kids call it -- has told more or less the same story, an absurdist comedy about an Englishman named Arthur Dent who wakes up one morning to find that his home is about to be bulldozed to make way for a new traffic bypass (that's a freeway to us Americans). As he argues with the hard-hearted bureaucrat who wishes to destroy his home, he is unaware that the exact same variety of bureaucrat is about to destroy our entire planet for essentially the same reason, to make way for a hyperspace express route. Arthur is saved from the rest of humanity's fate because his friend Ford turns out not to be from a London suburb but is, in fact, an alien who's been living on Earth for the last fifteen years. The two of them hitch a ride on a passing spaceship just in the nick of time and they proceed to have a string of adventures involving eccentric characters, bizarre (and funny) twists on standard science-fiction tropes, and, of course, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Exactly which adventures they have depends on which version of H2G2 you're experiencing, but all the versions hit basically the same major notes, and they all share the same tone and voice -- at least, they did until the movie version.

As with Sahara the night before, H2G2 gave me the feeling that I was watching imposters who were using the names of people in a book (and TV series) I once loved, but otherwise had little to do with the original property.

The movie wasn't a disaster. I was entertained. I did laugh, quite often actually. I enjoyed the fact that all the aliens were realized through puppetry and makeup instead of CGI (nothing better than good old-fashioned rubber monsters). Alan Rickman freakin' rocked as the voice of Marvin, the Paranoid Android. The tour of the planet-building facility on Magrathea was eye-popping. There were even some nice in-joke references to the old TV series (notably the appearance of the original Marvin in one scene). But overall, this movie just didn't feel like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to me.

The problem, I think, is that for the first time a version of Hitchhiker has been created without the full participation of Douglas Adams, the man who invented this whole crazy franchise and who personally wrote every earlier variant of the story. Adams passed away before completing his screenplay draft for this movie, and it's pretty easy to tell which bits were his and which were added by someone else. The familiar events that Adams has written of many times before -- the destruction of Earth, the Vogon constructor fleet, the discovery of the planet Magrathea and of the true nature of Earth -- these all felt right. The new stuff, like the sidetrip to the Vogon homeworld to rescue one of the crew or the sequence involving the always-bizarre John Malkovich, felt out-of-place and grafted on.

There was also a real problem with the film's tone, which feels like a back-and-forth power struggle between an American sensibility and a British story. For example, one of the more endearing things about earlier versions of H2G2 is the way everyone in the story is basically clueless. That's a conceit common to British comedy, and it's present in the scenes lifted from other versions of the story, as it should be. But in the new scenes, like the aforementioned rescue mission to Vogsphere, Arthur Dent is suddenly acting like a man with a backbone, out to kick butt and take names instead of just looking for a good cup of tea. That's how an American hero acts, and it's jarring to someone who is familiar with what Arthur is supposed to be like.

Also, the movie tries hard to let Arthur manufacture some sort of meaning for his adventures, and there is some added dramatic business about him and Trillian (another survivor of Earth) trying to come to terms with the destruction of their homeworld. But that's not H2G2; in every previous version of this story, the point was that there wasn't a point. The book and the old TV show presented the idea that the Universe is fundamentally screwed up -- it doesn't make sense, and it's never going to, regardless of how much we think about the meaning of it all -- so you may as well find a good party and enjoy yourself. As for coming to terms with losing Earth, Arthur makes occasional comments in the other versions about being upset, but basically he just carries on without too much regret, aside from wishing he could find a decent cup of tea.

And that leads me back to the characters, which are generally too far off from the earlier versions to feel authentic. The characterization of Arthur is all right, but Trillian has gone from an adventure-seeking genius/ditz to a mopey damsel-in-distress. Ford Prefect, who, admittedly, was always the least-well defined character in the earlier versions, is practically invisible through much of this movie. And then there's what they've done to poor Zaphod.

In the book, Zaphod Beeblebrox is essentially a fraud who's afraid people will discover he's not as cool as he presents himself to be. In the old TV series, he comes across as a bumbler, but it's the bumbling of a rock star who's attended one too many of his own parties and has the brain damage to show for it. In other words, he's an idiot, but he's cool. In the movie, he's just a plain old garden-variety idiot, oozing with feckless vanity and requiring a lemon-powered thinking cap to achieve even borderline functionality.

Sam Rockwell turns in a good performance in the part, I just don't like the way he's chosen to play him, nor do I like the way the filmmakers chose to handle the issue of Zaphod's second head. (In the old TV show, the second head was a phony-looking -- but funny -- puppet attached to actor Mark Wing-Davies' shoulder; here the second head is kind of below the "main" head, hidden inside the guy's shirt, and the two have a kind of constant struggle for dominance. It's too disturbing-looking to really be funny.)

At this point, assuming anyone is still reading this very long entry, I'm going to guess that you're thinking I shouldn't be comparing H2G2-the-Movie to the earlier versions, because the movie is its own animal, and a lot of people in the audience won't have had my experience with the BBC or printed variants. True... but I suspect they won't be following the story very well, either. The screenplay left out enough detail from the book that I think you have to have a fairly good working knowledge of the story going in to understand what's happening a lot of the time. The film doesn't strike me as overly friendly to the uninitiated, and as I've explained, there are too many problems for a genuine fan to fully appreciate it, either. So what does that leave us?

With yet another big special-effects remake that fails to capture what made the original a success in the first place.

And on that note, I don't see any alternative but to mix myself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and call it a night...