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05/02/2005: "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
I saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this weekend and while I liked it a lot, I can fully understand why others wouldn't. The movie is very loosely based on the books and parts of it are disturbing if you're the type of person who thinks the book version should be Gospel. It's not worth going into spoilerville just to explain a couple of these, but if you see it (and you've read the books) you'll see my point.
Someone told me that their friend was disappointed with it because there are setups for things explained in the book that are never explained in the movie. This is true, and a bit perplexing since the movie doesn't closely follow the book(s) at all. If you're going to make a movie based on a book, and are going to take all kinds of liberties... well, don't require someone to have read the book to "get it." This was the MAJOR problem with the fairly recent adaptation of a Vonnegut novel that starred Nick Nolte and Bruce Willis and was so horrible that I refuse to mention it by name.
Aside from this though, the movie was highly entertaining. I think Mos Def as Ford Prefect was a surprising and brilliant choice, and how could you possibly go wrong with Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android?
Replies: 7 Comments
on Monday, May 2nd, Erik said
That Nolte/Willis movie was one of the most jaw-droppingly misguided films I've ever seen.
Haven't seen HG2G yet, but I've been reading about it. The fidelity test always strikes me as wrong-headed (of course the movie's different from the book--that's why they call it a movie), but especially so in this case. One of Adams's gifts was that he knew that different are media are different, and the TV show was different from the books which were different from the radio plays. Why should the movie adhere to one or any previous version?
on Monday, May 2nd, dan said
I don't necessarily agree... if you're writing a movie based on a book, shouldn't there be some parity... especially if you're requiring knowledge of the book to explain things that are happening within the movie? I think so. On that level, the movie is a big failure.
However, as a standalone entity the movie is still entertaining. I don't see the point of calling it the same thing if the content has been changed as much as the H2G2 movie has. Why not rename the characters and recycle the story as something new with a different title?
The non-parity of the book and movie really works against the movie in this instance, precisely because it references the book.
The bad Vonnegut movie I mentioned before had exactly this problem... it absolutely required knowledge of the book, which absolutely caused disgust for the movie.
on Monday, May 2nd, Erik said
If you create a movie that requires knowledge of the book, you've made a bad movie. But it's not bad because it's unfaithful to the book--if anything, the problem is that it's faithful in useless ways.
on Monday, May 2nd, Erik said
... That said, again, I haven't seen H2G2, but there are cases in which knowledge of the source material enhances the adaptation but isn't required to understand it. An example is 'Permanent Midnight', the Ben Stiller movie based on Jerry Stahl's memoir of heroin addiction. The doctor who (as I recall) looks into the camera and tells Stiller he's killing himself is played by... Jerry Stahl. If you know this, it adds a little extra resonance, but if you don't, the moment still works.
on Monday, May 2nd, dan said
My point is that it's neither particularly faithful to the books, nor non-reliant upon them. So, it's got asides to things that are in the books, but unexplained in the movie, and it doesn't stick with the story from the books. It was entertaining, but overall, it wasn't great.
on Monday, May 2nd, dan said
... I get your point.
I think the movie was kinda pfft overall, and not just because it didn't follow the books.
The LOTR movies took liberties, and it was obviously necessary, but it didn't make the LOTR movies radically different from the books. The H2G2 movie was a basically different story than H2G2 story.
on Friday, May 6th, james said
hey Dan, do you still have your movie review page (in six words, or somthing like that). I remember reading it a couple of years ago.
