Arthur Dent wakes up one morning to find that the world is ending — literally. Earth is being demolished to make way for an intergalactic highway. Things start to get more confusing for Arthur when he discovers that his good friend, Ford Prefect is actually an alien from a distant star who has been stranded on earth. Ford is actually a traveling journalist for a wholly remarkable book known as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
Now Arthur will learn that losing your planet isn’t the end of the world.
This is one of the ultimate geek books, or series of books anyway, H2G2 (as it’s affectionaltley known by geeks) is actually a book and a series…
The 5 books being:
[list]
[*]The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
[*]The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
[*]Life, the Universe, and Everything
[*]So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
[*]Mostly Harmless
[/list]The ultimate guide also contains a vignette called Young Zaphod Plays It Safe.
The movie The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy[/url], somehow tries to cram all of these into one show, quite impossible…so it ends up as a bit of a jumble including all the buzzwords, or memorable scenes from the series.
There was a dirth of British actors to add some Britishness to the movie, which worked well, but Marvin was a bit of a failure, Mos Def pulled off his part as Ford Prefect well and the acting on the whole was good.
Martin Freeman from The Office[/url] fame did well as the protagonist Arthur Dent and Helen Mirren sounded suitable bored as Deep Thought.
The special effects are great, and it’s good to see some of the things on screen, the improbability drive, the actual guide itself, the Vorgons and their poetry, but in parts it was a little ‘too’ Hollywood.
It’s a pretty bad representation of the books, but if you’ve read the books you’ll probably enjoy seeing all your favourite geeky moments on screen, I did..
If you haven’t read the book you probably won’t understand half of it as it’s an eclectic jumble of peices from the whole series, but whatever you do, YOU MUST READ THE BOOKS!
All in all a little disappointed, but well it’s worth a watch if you’re a fan, if not you can probably give it a miss, I’m glad I didn’t take my white towel along afterall.
If they’d just made the first book into a movie it would have been enough already, I know Douglas Adams was involved in the screenplay writing for the movie, but I don’t know his intentions and how much it has changed from the inception.
Anyway just my 2 cents 😉
The BBC TV series is good too, and the radio show, so if you get a chance to check those out, please do.
I give it a half hearted 5.5/10
u mean there was NOTHING ON THE TOWEL?!?!?!
I want to take home a life-szed marvin though. So cute.
Felt the same way too. It was like watching a feature-length trailer of a ‘H2G2 Highlights Show’.
Loved the BBC series, and I think I was the only one who laughed out loud when Marvin from that series made a cameo appearance in the movie… 😉
the movie is that bad, huh?
It certainly wasn’t horribly horrendous, but it was very far from being great.
It can have a naked picture of Pamela Anderson on it if you like, just don’t leave home without your towel!
mah ci pet.. i meant the movie didn’t have any references to the towel meh?
To give the filmmakers credit, it IS a difficult task bringing Douglas Adams’ books to “life”. However I think they could have done much better. Disappointing was my verdict. I also think the actress who played Trillian did the role no justice whatsover.
hey, I thought it was freaking briliant… 🙂
It’s a nigh impossible task, but at least taking one book at a time would have been more ‘doable’
Yeah I agree, Trillian should be hot!
Even the TV series she was hot with cleavage and all sorts of cool stuff 😉
Of course got, got plenty mah, it’s not H2G2 with no towel!!
You have read the books right….?
The books I consider Brilliant, the TV series I consider Great, the movie I consider pushing mediocre..
Never read the books or caught the TV series, but I rather liked the movie.
A lil confusing (read: plain weird) at times, but it was packed with slapstick and general omgwtf humour. Still a good fun flick to catch, even if the story was rather disjointed.
Then again, maybe I enjoyed it because of the free tickets, hahah.
no updatesabout the Tim Yang thingy?
Haha patience dear, maybe tommorow 😀
Perhaps the producers should have risked a trilogy of sorts, just so things didn’t get too squashed up.
There’s a lesson learnt there.
*tim yang’s hits are belong to me :P*
Haven’t read the books, but I’m willing to bet they’re probably much funnier than the movie. I think the British dry humour probably doesn’t translate well to screen because you tend to miss the nuances when all you have is a few seconds to glance at a scene. I’ve always preferred books for that very reason: you get to picture each detail in your mind, construct the picture, so to speak; you know where all the characters are at any given time, and can savour the way they speak and take your time to listen to what they’re saying.
That’s why great books tend to make lousy movies as the great books allow you to create a new world inside your head, along with the characters, the scenes and the parts of the story..
Movies are generally just an easily digestible form of these books, and can in no way capture the true essence.
I mean LOTR was a most valiant effort, but if you have read the books, the moies still pale in comparison.
Some stories however are thought up in terms of being a screenplay and these work fine, like the way Dan Brown writes his books for instance, that’s why they are so popular and easy to read, he writes like it’s already a screenplay, you don’t need imagination, you just read.
Yeah that would have worked much better, like LOTR was originally 6 volumes, which became three and thus a trilogy on the silver screen.
H2G2 would have been better dealt with that way.
sigh, i absolutely adored the entire ‘trilogy’ of 5 books, and i guess i set the bar too high for the movie.
the cast was alright, but as you mentioned earlier, was rather puzzled with the casting of mos def as the darling quirk, ford prefect. isn’t ford supposed to be pale with gingery hair? aih.
i can go on all day with little grouses but that’s that, the movie’s made and it barely makes an ‘okay’ 🙁
oh well, looks like we’ll all have to resort to our fantabuloustical (bad mangling of words) imaginations when reading the book!
‘i don’t have time to read, i’m the presiden of the galaxy!’
heh.
Don’t worry Michelle, I am sure Hollywood will remake it in ten to fifteen years and screw it up even worse (as is the Hollywood way!)
i had to switched my dvd after the first 20 minutes, kinda boring …
What’s the point of reading without imagination?! May as well watch TV. No need for imagination, just sit there and let the ‘idiot box’ entertain you. (That’s my dad’s term for the TV. You can tell I didn’t watch much TV growing up, can’t you?)
Exactly, I didn’t watch TV growing up and still don’t now, I don’t even have Astro..
I just use the TV for watching movies, that’s all.
TV destroys imagination.
I mean great if you have imagination it makes the experience better, but if you don’t you can still read Dan Brown books, that’s why they are so popular.
good lord no, it’s bad enough as it is *weeps*
hehe, that makes me feel better about the current version though, thanks dabby 😛 in a twisted way, it isn’t as bad as it can (and should hollywood have their way) will be.
I was just reading some of the comments and I realised some commenters think that the movie encompassed all of Adam’s books.
It doesn’t. The movie is based (loosely) on the first book only. I expect a sequel on The Restaurant At The End of The Universe soon…