Movie/Blu-ray Review: 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' (2005 Feature Film)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG)(2005)

Directed by: Gareth Jennings

Written by: Douglas Adams, Karey Kirkpatrick

Based on:  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Starring: Martin Freeman, Yasin Bey (as Mos Def), Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Helen Mirren, Warwick Davis, Anna Chancellor, Bill Nighy, John Malkovich

The Book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. More popular, certainly more successful than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-Three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is This God Person Anyway?

On April 29, 2005, one day after its London premiere, the long-awaited film adaptation of Douglas Adams' sci-fi comedy novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) opened its theatrical run in North America. Written by Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick and directed by Gareth Jennings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had spent over 20 years in what movie industry insiders call Development Hell before The Walt Disney Company's Touchstone Pictures studio agreed to finance it. 

The most astonishing adventure in the universe begins when the world ends. - Tagline for HHGTTG

Like Douglas Adams' original 1978 BBC Radio series and his eponymous novel, HHGTTG follows the zany space odyssey of mild-mannered Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), the often-bewildered Englishman who, along with Tricia "Trillian" McMillan (Zooey Deschanel), is one of the two Earth-native survivors of the planet's destruction by the space-faring race known as the Vogons.

The catalyst for Arthur's unwitting jaunt across the galaxy is his friend Ford Prefect (actor/rapper Yasin Bey, billed here as Mos Def). Shortly before the Earth is demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, Ford tells Arthur that he's not from the city of Guilford after all, but from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. 

HHGTTG's story (loosely based on the novel) is hard to summarize without giving too much of the plot away in a review. Suffice it to say that after the hapless Arthur and Ford are improbably rescued from certain death in the vacuum of space by Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), Trillian, and Marvin the Paranoid Android (voiced by Alan Rickman), they cruise across the vast reaches of the Milky Way in the stolen starship Heart of Gold. Zaphod, who is the fugitive President of the Galaxy, is searching for a long-lost planet known as Magrathea, although his motives are not clear at first. 

The Book: The Encyclopedia Galactica, in its chapter on Love states that it is far too complicated to define. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of love: Avoid, if at all possible. Unfortunately, Arthur Dent has never read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

My Take

The Book: In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people angry and has widely been considered as a bad move.

If you have read Douglas Adams' 1978 novel (which was based on HHGTTG's original incarnation as a radio series on Britain's BBC 4 channel), you know that much of the humor in the book is derived from the late author's wit and love of wordplay. In all of his Hitchhiker's novels (five in total, and the sixth one in development when he died suddenly on May 11, 2001)  Adams crafted carefully-written sentences that were calculated for comedic effect. This kind of humor writing works exceedingly well in print media, but it is insanely difficult to replicate on film. 

The Book: It's an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, Man had always assumed that he was the most intelligent species occupying the planet, instead of the third most intelligent. The second most intelligent creatures were, of course, dolphins who, curiously enough, had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth. They had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger, but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits. So they eventually decided they would leave earth by their own means. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the Star-Spangled Banner, but in fact, the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

The screenplay that Adams (who died four years before the film's premiere while writing a draft of HHGTTG for Jay Roach, a member of the film's team of producers) and Karey Kirkpatrick (Chicken Run) has moments in which the novel's literary style infuses its cinematic adaptation with gems of comedic genius. Most of them occur whenever the film's unseen narrator, aka The Book (voice of Stephen Fry) is heard as Adams' whimsical version of a Greek chorus.  

Some of the novel's best-remembered "set-pieces" (which also appeared, in different versions, in the BBC radio series and its 1981 six-part BBC-TV adaptation) are also in the Adams-Kirkpatrick script, although the film's version of events compresses them - sometimes a bit too much, to their detriment.

Barman: Did you say the world is coming to an end? Shouldn't we all lie on the floor or put paper bags over our heads?

Ford: If you like.

Barman: Will it help?

Ford: Not at all.

[Ford runs out of the pub]

Barman: Last orders, please!

Although HHGTTG is by no means a great film and was a box office failure (its worldwide gross was $104.5 million against an estimated budget of $45-50 million), it is not a bad film, either. It is gently irreverent, wildly inventive (Adams wisely chose to take the story in a new direction while at the same time staying true to his original concept of a madcap sci-fi comedy.)  Most importantly, it was Adams who approved Touchstone's decision to cast American actors in several key roles. He pointed out that the only character who had to be English was the lead, Arthur Dent, played perfectly here by Martin Freeman (The Hobbit Trilogy). 

Freeman's oft-bewildered Arthur is surrounded by a great Anglo-American cast that includes Alan Rickman (voice of Marvin), Helen Mirren (voice of Deep Thought), Stephen Fry, Zooey Deschanel,  Bill Nighy, Richard Griffiths (voice of Jeltz), John Malkovich, and Thomas Lennon. There is also a cameo appearance by Simon Jones, the actor who originated the role of Arthur on radio and the 1981 TV series, and we see homages to the previous incarnations of HHGTTG throughout the 108-minute long film.

I didn't see HHGTTG when it was out in theaters 15 years ago. I heard from other Adams aficionados that the film somehow "betrayed" the author's original intent and that the casting of Mos Def (real name, Yasin Bey) was a bad move on the producers' part. I should have gone anyway, but I was swayed by all the negative comments and said, "I'm skipping this one." 

Pity, because now that I have it on Blu-ray, I now wish I'd seen it in a proper theater. The film's first opening scene (it has two!) alone, the big musical number with the dolphins singing So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, is worth the price of admission. 

The Book: What to do if you find yourself stuck with no hope of rescue: Consider yourself lucky that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your present circumstances seems more likely, consider yourself lucky that it won't be troubling you much longer.

And speaking of the Blu-ray:

Released on high definition on January 23, 2007 by Buena Vista Home Entertainment, The  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is definitely a first-generation Blu-ray disc (BD) offering. Buena Vista (the Walt Disney Company's home media distribution company) did a good job with the film-to-digital media transfer, and the disc boasts a clear, vivid image which shows off cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo's stunning camera work and production designer Joel Collin's inventive and oft-mindbending set designs. 

BVHE also paid a lot of attention to the audio, providing the disc with an audio experience that is phenomenal due to its lossless PCM audio and Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks that are best heard on a five-speaker home theater system. The film's inventiveness depends on the dialogue, sound effects, and the music, so it is heartening to see that Disney didn't skimp on the video or audio for this release, its status as a box office flop notwithstanding.

I was going to ding The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for not offering a better selection of extras, but after some reflection, I am not going to. HHGTTG is, after all, one of those unlucky films that had a painfully-long development process and failed to gain the audience it deserves.  So, without further ado, here are the extra features in the 2007 Blu-ray: 

• Audio Commentary with Producer Robbie Stamp and Douglas Adams' colleague Sean Solle
• Audio Commentary with Director Garth Jennings, Producer Nick Goldsmith and Actors Martin Freeman and Bill Nighy
• Deleted Scenes
• Really Deleted Scenes
• Additional Guide Entry: The Man and the Fish