At some point during the latter part of middle school or earlier part of high school, I was given a little book by a friend. The book was simply labeled "DON'T PANIC!" in big letters, and was titled on the inside as "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy". I was told that it was a great book, and the cover piqued my interest, so naturally I started reading it.
It actually looked like this, but I want the copy I just described.
Not since "Narnia" had I enjoyed a book that much. It was witty, it was seemingly random, it was smart, it was ridiculous, and it was fun. The author, Douglas Adams, had won my loyalty. Inside the pages of this little novel of his, he forced me into the shoes of Arthur Dent, a regular joe who wakes up one morning to discover that his house is being destroyed to make room for a highway, then has his planet destroyed to make room for a larger highway, narrowly being rescued by his quirky neighbor who turns out to be an alien. Hilarity ensues.
The book was so great that it came as no surprise to me that a movie had been released a year or two ago, though being in middle school I had better things to think about (namely Star Wars III and my discovery of music as actually being a thing), so it actually took me some time before I sat down and watched the entire movie. When I did, I was slightly disappointed for a couple of reasons.
First off, the portrayal of something so very science-fictiony is quick to disappoint. From the very get-go, I met the Vogons, a slug-like construction crew race which I had imagined as industrial and gritty and painted in safety-bar colors...
This, but in a spacesuit.
...And instead found something that resembled the freak love-child of Tim Burton's Penguin and Sloth from "The Goonies".
Vogon Poetry: "Hehe, Chocolate? Chocolate!"
Furthermore, it appears that the motives behind the Vogon constructor fleet's complete destruction of Earth has been changed from "Ironically timed interplanetary highway construction" to "Purely for shits and giggles".
Next, we were introduced to Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox, a (mostly) humanoid native of Betelgeuse Five who is on the run after having stolen the most advanced starship in the universe, the Heart of Gold. The book mentioned that he was "clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn't have guessed", and that he had two heads and three arms, the extra arm having been added in to assist in his ski-boxing career. Zaphod is brilliant, ruthlessly self-obsessed, and somewhat of a romantic, and was overall one of the easiest characters in the entire book for me to associate with.
Pictured: The guy who's got my vote.
That was the book though. In the movie, we got douchebag Thor.
Pictured: Clever extrovert. Or hippie cub scout. One of the two.
The movie version of our badass space-pirate president (who, by the way, is the inventor of and the only person alive who can drink more than three Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters) is incredibly vain, incredibly irresponsible, and incredibly... Well, besides that, he's not much like the book version of himself at all. Also, as we can clearly see, he appears to be missing a head (It's totally been moved to his chest).
Zaphod's starship, the Heart of Gold, is driven by a revolutionary new technology called an infinite improbability drive, which is a modified version of a party device that a lab-tech's apprentice accidentally discovered one day while cleaning up from one of said parties. It basically functions by causing the ship and the area around it to undergo all of the least likely scenarios possible at the moment, one of which is destined to eventually be arrival at your destination (but not before temporarily turning our main character into a penguin and transforming two guided nuclear missiles into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias). Did I mention that it's powered by tea?
The movie largely forgot about such things , opting instead to focus on our man Arthur and his girly Trillian (who he somehow met in a bar while she was supposed to be off in space doing space stuff) and the inevitable love-triangle involving douchebag Thor up there.
Oh, and one of the best characters in the book was Marvin the Chronically Depressed Android. Marvin was the smartest robot ever built, with a brain the size of a planet that made him 50,000 times more intelligent than a human (or 30 billion times more intelligent than a mattress, if you prefer to see it that way), yet depressingly enough never got a chance to show off his brains as he was constantly following a couple of idiots around in search for the legendary planet of Margathea.
Marvin's story is so depressing I deemed it necessary to show you baby sea otters.
Enter the Marvin of the movie, a depressed and comically disproportionate walking Macbook who, despite being one of the smartest beings in the galaxy hits his head on two or three different things during the movie for comic effect. Simply put, bastardization of a brilliant idea in the name of slapstick.
Seen here doing the robot for unknown rea... Oh, I get it. Kinda.
Eventually, the movie moves out of love-triangle territory and more into quirky science fiction territory, much like the book of the same name, as the crew of the Heart of Gold somehow figure out the coordinates of Margathea from visiting President Beeblebrox's election opponent, and go on their way (despite the fact that the point of the Infinite Improbabilty Drive is that you don't actually need coordinates since you'll wind up there sooner or later). Along the way, they re-encounter the Vogons, who immediately decide to arrest Zaphod for escaping their poetry reading earlier. A chase scene ensues, ending with the Vogons accidentally arresting Trillian, and Dent's insistence that they visit the Vogon Capitol to free her. Thus, the next bit of the movie is spent waiting in line to rescue her (a part that I don't remember from the book).
After making the team file a good amount of paperwork, the Vogons allow the team to free Trillian, then decide that they want her back or something and start chasing the Heart of Gold. Something resembling a space battle ensues, building up to the launch of two guided nuclear missiles at the Heart of Gold. Zaphod activates the Improbability Drive, and turns the missiles into a sperm whale and a flowerpot, and successfully lands the ship on Margathea. From here, the movie doesn't digress from the book as much, so I won't go into as much detail over this part.
Basically, we find out stuff that Zaphod had spoiled earlier in the film (not the book), such as THE ANSWER TO LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING (spoiler alert. It's totally forty-two.), and discover that the Earth was a supercomputer meant to calculate the Question To Life And The Universe And Everything, destroyed by the Volons (for no apparent reason according to the movie). Zaphod immediately suggests several questions, of which the best appears to be "How many roads must a man walk down?". This is settled on, and the crew decides to go have lunch at the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, leaving an obvious (though canonical) desire for a sequel to be produced to this all-out mess of movie.
A feat nobody has ever managed without the employment of Megan Fox's "talent".
More like "Talents", huh? (High fives self)
That is, in a nutshell, everything that is wrong with the film adaption of "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy". For those of you too lazy to have read the book, but willing to have made it through this post, I will present to you a follow-up post shortly entitled "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: What Should Have Been", with my vision for a more canonically correct, smarter, overall funnier (or at least less reliant on awkward romances and bad slapstick) production that would have actually garnered a trilogy.
If you don't want to read that, BBC also produced their own version a few years ago, and I hear that it was quite entertaining. You may check that out.
Ever watch the original movie? It was low budget and is kind of old, but they stayed far truer to the book and it's pretty good.
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