Movie Review -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Whenever a classic book is made into a movie there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The hard-core fans always dread the inevitable deviations, deletions, and insertions to their revered gospel. Well, don't panic.

ball-and-chain and I took our 9 year-old son to see it last week and we were pleasantly surprised. The movie had plenty of laughs, and even our son could follow and enjoy it. Obviously much that is in the book didn't make the movie. There is also some of the movie that was not in the book that was required to make the story make at least a little sense, but it worked well. The other notable difference is the satisfying romantic Hollywood plot line complete with a kiss at the end. The book, if I remember it correctly, only had admiration from afar and frustration in the romance department. There was never anything as satisfying as a kiss.

Mos Def perfectly captures the hoopy Ford Prefect. Stephen Fry, the frood who played Jeeves in the BBC production of the Wodehouse classics, if you sass who I mean, narrates the movie with perfect style. His voice is classically British, but he enunciates so clearly that even us Yanks have no problem understanding. Trillian is played by Zooey Deschanel, who could easily be a drug rep, and Arthur Dent is played by Martin Freeman, an actor who really knows where his towel is. The special effects are a lot of fun and involve both puppetry and digital effects.

So we really liked it. The best thing is that we're all reading the book together as a family now.

If you want to do more research on all things related to Hitchhiker's, including the book, the film, and the original British radio series, there's no better place to start than this Wikipedia entry. - served up by Doctor Bean @ 7:42 PM