Douglas Adams would cry
by Ross Catrow
A couple days ago I netflix’d The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had been looking forward to watching the movie for quite a while because 1) the Hitchhiker books are pretty amazing, and 2) it had the guy from the office in it.
Well let me just say: don’t watch this movie.
Hey, I am an easy going guy. I typically like most movies. I even enjoyed watching I, Robot. I like both mindless movies and movies that make you think. I like old movies and new movies. I like animated movies and documentaries. I’m sayin’ I like movies here.
But don’t watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
HG collects the most notable quotes and inside jokes from the book and shakes them up a in jar. Then it spills them out on the ground and stomps on them. The writers/directors didn’t feel the need to explain any of them to those who may have not read the books. “Oh hey you guys know about 42 right? Oh thats a thing.” Or “hey mice are the smart ones, also we build planets!”
The whole endeavor is difficult to follow and confusing. Don’t watch it. Such a shame because Douglas Adams rocked.
i thought it was okay. i also thought i had gone to see it with you, but i guess not.
i’m not real fond of the books though.
Totals. It was spotty and disorganized and tried to cram too much into too little time. But let’s be reasonable, it was a stupid idea in the first place to try to put it into a feature film time length. That shit needs to be mini-seriesed, and it needs to have a seriously good narrator, and that’s already happened anyway thanks to the BBC. Plus I thought that dolphin song at the beginning was embarrassingly bad, and this is from someone who watches musicals constantly.
I sort of have the hots for Mos Def though. And Sam Rockwell was pretty good too.
Yeah I meant to mention the narrator thing too. Like the book relies on the narrator a whole lot, and the movie just kind of had it added in as an after thought.
It would be pretty tight as a miniseries though.