A Wizard Walked Along The Beach, But No one Needed Him

This weekend Krissa and I went up to Rhode Island to visit her parents for Greek Easter, and on Friday night we went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

I've got a lot of feelings about this film because I've lived with and loved the books for so long, and in that time I've listened to the original radio version and seen the TV series (on DVD), and both of them differ from the books I love.

There will never be a complete transfer from the written word to the silver screen. You just can't get everything perfect for everyone, because even something which is perfectly transferred from the imagination of the writer will not be the same thing seen in the imagination of the people reading the written words. People complained about the Great Hall at Hogwart's in the first Harry Potter movie, until JK Rowling weighed in and said that it was portrayed exactly as she herself imagined it.

So once you've crossed the boundary into the pschologically healthy territory where you can accept that nothing is ever going to be transferred perfectly, you can stand atop a hilltop in this new land, and look around and see that some things would be bloody hard to make into a two hour film.

A sandwich, for example, or a small dog named Raymond.
Both of these examples would be very difficult to fit into the projector.

Or, alternatively speaking, there is a real challenge in taking something which isn't a story with a particularly linear or ending-orientated plot and making it into a two hour film.
Hitchhiker's isn't a road movie.
The first book doesn't stand alone with a nice rounded start and a satisfactory ending - it's the start of a journey into an Earthless universe which wanders off into another four brilliant, more or less directionless novels. The main human character doesn't get a love interest until book 4, and an off-the-cuff remark about a bowl of petunias in book 1 turns into a full-blown plotline in book 5 (using your memory as a reference tool has limits. It's 4 or 5, I'm sure)...but you get the impression - there is very little about the Hitchhiker books which would transfer into anything but a long series. There's just too much stuff.

Okay?
So it's not going to be the same, and it's not all going to be there.
It's an adaptation, and it's an adaptation of five sporadically sensical, scatterbrained and consistently off-the-wall books into a movie, a format which we well know as smooth, contained, seamless, linear...and with a relatively short attention span.

So it's different. I'm just defending the adaptation side of things - that things had to change, and if they hadn't, the film wouldn't have worked at all.

The film itself?
I enjoyed it enormously.
I think a part of the enjoyment of the experienced bordered on relishing it. Through articles or web publishing I followed Douglas Adams' lengthy and ulitmately, for him, unsuccessful quest to get the Hitchhiker's film off the ground, through rights-ownership purgatory, adaptation and company-confidence hell, and all this cyclically sprinkled with periods of elusive all-systems-go heaven, and it really made me feel for him.

When he died so suddenly nearly four years ago, he had just finished yet another draft of the film screenplay.
I heard the news while on-air at RaW, and I think everyone in the station at that moment who heard the news at that moment had a similar reaction; along the lines of, 'Ah, shit.'
This was a man who could really think. He was incredibly funny, passionate about his family, charmingly procrastinatory about his work (although my impression of his brilliance was only increased when he told of how he wrote one of the Hitchhiker's books in three weeks when his Publisher took drastic action to get some draft out of him), pragmatic and sensible about the technologies he became famous through ridiculing, communication, people and the earth.

So when Krissa and I sat down in the cinema, a large popcorn between us, I relished the feeling that the film was a real achievement. It was an achieved goal of someone who I greatly admire who did not live to see its completion, and that feeling made me happy to see it.
When the 'So Long And Thanks For All The Fish' showtune came on, I was already happy.
So maybe my review won't be terrifically impartial, but hey.

I loved it.
[The following bits might spoil the film for you if you haven't seen it yet]

I thought that the visual work was excellent, Marvin was perfect, and Mos Def was an astoundingly good Ford Prefect -just the right mix of distanced oddness combined with a layer of cool.
On the other hand, there was so much of the books' stuff crammed into the film that I felt at times it might have been a bit hard to get the most out of the film if you hadn't already read the books - I've already spoken to someone who left after the first fifteen minutes, defending himself to me with the reason, "I dunno man, some of that British humour is kinda dry..."
But then again, if you hadn't already read the books, then the Earth plotline was a little anti-climactic, and the ending a trifle sudden.
BUT HEY.
I enjoyed picking up on the few nods to the past incarnations - the old Marvin standing in line, the old Arthur Dent as the welcome hologram at Magrathea...but they were pretty blatant.
I think the casting, overall, was magnificent. Bill Nighy was a precisely pitched Slartibartfast, apologetic and absent-minded, obsessed with his fjords. Alan Rickman's voice was perfect for Marvin, Stephen Fry an excellent Voice, and, I have to say, Sam Rockwell pulled off an impressive Zaphod Beeblebrox. There was enough egotistical stupidity and bluster for me to get into believing him in the role, despite the pop-up second head.
Martin Freeman? Well. I think he was spot-the-fuck-on. I always thought that Simon Jones' version of Arthur Dent in the TV series was a little too moany. A little too displaced and lost in the new alien world he found himself in. The Arthur in the movie, however, has a little more spine and kick to him, which I like. He's still nothing approaching the action hero, but at least he does more than wander around with his hands in his dressing gown pockets, moaning in a very polite way.

So there you go. I was so pleased that Hitchhiker's got filmed that the fact itself put me in a good mood, but this morning Metro reported that it topped the US box office over the weekend, and that's made my day.

I thought about Douglas Adams again this morning as I stood, waving my dripping wet hands around in front of an automated motion-sensor paper towel dispenser to no avail, and feeling that I must look like a right nooly.