Low Budget

I saw the movie.  I immediately told a good friend mind who has not read the books not to see it.  Another friend, who has read them, will be asking me for a review, and I can't really decide.  Was it good?  Funny?  How often did I have to remind myself to keep an open mind?

 

When making a book into a movie, one type of authenticity to be conserved is that of the relationship to the source material.  Books and movies are different, obviously.  What works in one may not work in another.  The relationship between book and movie is always a problem.  The movie story is always smaller, shorter, without a lot of background.  Casting may not be satisfying to many readers, or in some cases, even to the author.  Hitchhiker's is a special problem, though.  I don't think anyone read it thinking: "this would make a great movie."  The weird sidebars and rapidly overlapping absurdity is more textual than visual.  Even apparently visual sequences are playing with the absurdity of metaphor as well.

But the books are much-loved.  With a lot of books, you jack up the title and swap out everything underneath.  Here, that would be sacrilige.  The books are adored, and so is the author, who screwed things up even worse by dying way too soon.  One means of authentication, authorial approval, is thus removed.  Sure, he worked on the screenplay, but he didn't finish it.  If he had lived, we might have found him to be, like Stephen King, a master on the page but a hack on the screen.  Or not.  But dead, he is sanctified, and any short-coming in the film will be held against someone else.

They tried to be faithful, and in many ways did a good job.  The use of animated entries from the Hitchhiker's Guide iteslf gave a framework in which many of the books purely textual passages could be presented in all their fun.  The whale and potted petunias are onscreen long enough to give at least a sense of that absurd interruption.  But a lot of things happen just too quickly.  The babble fish, the word Belguim, and other keys are tossed by the audience in ways that merely reminded us of how funny the book is.

In the end, the question is, for whom was this movie made?  The audience of people who've never read the books, who don't know what it is all about may get a few laughs and go away thinking it's pretty clever.  Those who've known about the books but never got around to reading them may think this is the easy way out.  Not a good idea.  Anyone, from now on, who claims an authentic connection to Douglas Adams by virtue of having seen the movie will be escorted off of the premises.  How about for those who've read the books?  Well, the movie does serve well as a salute to the books.  The dolphin sequence is quite fun, and, somehow, though I was often disappointed during the film itself, I discovered a lump in my throat by the end.  The closing reference to going for lunch at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.  Took me back to the end of the novel itself, and the sense of wonder I'd had after just zipping through it.  Also, having a movie made is a mark of validation, an honor to the books.  As a fan, even if the movie didn't quite work for me, I was very happy to see it at number one.  And, I have a renewed hunger to re-read the books.