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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It was well nigh an impossible task to make a movie that would please all the fans of the Hitchhiker's books, as well as appeal to those who were new to the Douglas Adams oeuvre.

To satisfy the first group, all the beloved scenes from the beloved books, the beloved 1978 radio show and tapes, and the beloved 1981 television program would have to be included, which would make even the first instalment too long for any movie theatre.

Moreover, part of the charm of the the earlier versions had been their lack of polish. The novels started and stopped and jumped around in a most confusing way, reflecting the bewilderment of the Every Man main character thrown into a larger universe that runs on rather different principles than he might have expected. In terms of special effects, the mini-series on British television (and on tapes and DVDs everywhere else) was miles behind the contemporary Star Wars movie series and barely above the BBC's clunky old Dr Who, with papier mache villains and crude animated sequences. This captured perfectly the spirit of the books—keeping the focus on the bizarre and hilarious ideas, rather than any sci-fi eye candy.

To work as a movie though—a big, technicolor, box-office pleasing movie—the glitches have to be ironed out. The thing has to make sense in cinematic terms for a cinematic audience which sees state-of-the-art science fiction flicks on a regular basis. However far-fetched and mind-boggling some of the concepts are in the film, the whole thing has got to seem real as we're watching it. We have to believe Arthur and Ford are really in space, really landing on other worlds, really watching planets being manufactured.

And in my view they've done a fabulous job of doing this, while keeping the essentially cock-eyed vision of Douglas Adams at the heart of it.

Much has been made of the changes to the supposed Hitchhiker canon—adding a love triangle involving Arthur, Trillian and Zaphod, inventing new characters and scenes such as with new villain Humma Kavula (played by John Malkovich), cutting some of the more famous exchanges that fans can recite by rote.

But the problem with this complaint is that there is no Hitchhiker canon. Adams was inventing and reshaping the story throughout the years of radio shows, books, television, and even a stage play. He himself was behind many of the continuing changes for the film that finally came out four years after his death. Adams would no doubt find it ironic that fans of stories that are all about impermanence and uncertainty in the universe would protest about changes in those very stories.

Rather than take umbrage at our mental images of Hitchhiker being messed with, we should consider whether the latest set of images are worthy of being added to our collection.

I think they are. I can no longer conjure up the excitement I felt when first being exposed to the Adams universe—I never will be able to experience that again—but I certainly got something new out of the 2005 movie. Namely a sense of it not being just an intellectual game any more. It's a story with real characters (however bizarre at times), working out real life-and-death issues (however apocalyptic at times), and engaging in very human activities (however alien the setting and circumstances at times).

Okay, the love affair bit was lame. And I still didn't quite accept the mice as being in charge of the experiment known as earth—it's a funnier concept on paper than on screen with real, little rodents. And the story was never quite as laugh-out-loud weird as it seemed two decades earlier—we've been exposed to a lot of weird stuff in the meantime. But the basic concept, or multitude of concepts, still worked. The tour of the interstellar construction site led by Slartibartfast (Bill Nighy deliciously eccentric as ever) was awesome. The bureaucratic, bad-poetry spouting, and incredibly dumb Vogons were hilarious. (All right, I did laugh out loud, come to think of it.) And all the main characters were terrific, even daring choices: who would have expected a black hip-hop artist, Mos Def, to work as Ford Prefect, or American actress Zooey Deschanel to score as Trillian. And it's great how the few animated sequences showing excerpts from the Guide (narrated by Stephen Fry) use up-to-date computer techniques to produce rather crude and very funny illustrations. And I love what they did with Zaphod Beeblebrox's (Sam Rockwell's) second head.

Now this latter item is actually one that Hitchhiker fanatics have criticized. They actually preferred the phoney head sewn onto Zaphod's neck and obviously operated mechanically by remote control in the 1981 series, rather than the CGI-assisted quick-change head of the new film, which I thought an arresting effect.

But you can see what's happening. Most films adapted from books have to contend with readers comparing them to the original text, but with Hitchhiker everyone who's fallen in love with any of its prior multimedia manifestations, has a bone to to pick with this new effort. And even trying to review and defend the recent movie as a movie in itself, I fall back into odious comparisons.

But here's something for longtime fans to think about. Even if it's not an immediately giant blockbuster of a hit, the 2005 film will over the years expose more people to Adams's intelligent zaniness than all the Hitchhiker books, series, plays, and even videogames, that preceded it. If the flick is even a moderately good one—and I think it's better than that—Adams and the Hitchhiker world are well served.

This film takes us to the end of the first book and we're led to believe that we're about to take off to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe territory in the sequel. I hope so.

— Eric