Early review savages Hitchhiker. Finding towel, trying not to panic...

[Lone Pawn]

http://planetmagrathea.com/longreview1.html (spoilers)

Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that's just peanuts to the Hitchhiker's movie...

...What we have here is a story which changes some of the really, really basic, iconic elements of Hitchhiker's as established in all the previous variant editions. That wouldn't be so bad if it changed these elements for the purposes of creating a good film, but that is sadly not the case. What has emerged from all this chopping and changing is an incoherent mess in which important things happen for no reason except to advance the plot and unimportant things happen for no reason at all...

...I wasn't expecting this movie to be perfect. I expected a curate's egg. But what I got was a rotten egg. Apart from the Magrathean factory floor/Earth Mark II sequence, nothing in the film really works. It's an unsalvageable mess which will annoy fans and will confuse (and annoy) non-fans.

I feared that I might find a funny sci-fi movie which bore a passing resemblance to Hitchhiker's Guide, but what I found instead was a desperately unfunny sci-fi movie which bore a passing resemblance to Hitchhiker's Guide. All that time, all that effort, all that attention to detail - wasted. In fact, I believe that is where the key fault lies. The film-makers put so much effort into the details that they lost sight of the bigger picture. They were so obsessed with filling the screen with things like jewelled scuttling crabs, replicas of Douglas Adams’ nose and other things that, really, no-one gives a damn about, that important things like a coherent plot or well-rounded characters went out of the window, along with any line of the original that might be considered funny.

Hitchhiker's is not so bad that it's good. It's just miserably, depressingly bad. It misses the point by a light year. Is it a good movie? No. Is it a good version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Definitely not. It is ill-conceived, badly written, poorly directed and worst of all staggeringly unfunny. It is a travesty of a film. I mourn for it, I really do.


Oh, dear God. This guy tears it to pieces, scene-by-scene, in the full, four-page review. And most horrifying of all, the writer knows his HG2G. Very well. This isn't some idiot Hollywood blowhard spouting off about something he knows nothing about. Oh, so depressing. :scared:

[truebrit71]

1. Crap...I was looking forward to this movie....

...bugger, bugger, bugger!!!

[Lone Pawn]

2. Oh, and non-spoiler review here.

http://planetmagrathea.com/shortreview.html

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It’s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really pisspoor, unfunny jokes; they have replaced them with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick...

...There are quite a few nods to Douglas Adams himself and although these go some way to making up for the almost complete absence of his name from the publicity, surely a better way of paying tribute to this much-loved, much-missed author would be to not fuck about with the sublimely witty dialogue that he sweated blood to create.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is an abomination. Whereas the radio show, TV show, books and computer game are all recognisably variations on a theme, this is something new and almost entirely unrelated. It’s not even a good film if viewed as an original work: the characters are unsympathetic, the cast exhibit no chemistry, the direction is pedestrian, the pace plodding, the special effects overpowering (lots and lots of special effects, none of them funny mind you) and above all the script is amazingly, mindbogglingly awful. Oh, and they have taken most of the jokes out.

This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep.

[SheepyMcSheepster]

3. hmm, doesn't sound good

didn't Adams write the screenplay? i would assume he wouldn't butcher his own story. I realise somethings are different from the books as the book are different from the original radio plays.

regardless i will have to see this movie for myself.

[Lone Pawn]

6. Yes, but he's been dead for five years--

the years in which the movie was actually storyboarded, shot, edited, re-edited, re-written, and re-re-edited.

[ewagner]

4. Take heart...

it appears that the reviewer is a fan of HG2G and know the work very well. In a sense, advocates/fans are the worst critics. Maybe it's not as bad as he thinks....

hopefully.

[Lone Pawn]

8. I hope you're right. n/t

[northzax]

10. exactly,

I hear purists complain about the LOTR series all the time, but you know what? it was actually pretty good.

[cprise]

5. It's only what-- 90 minutes?

Please get real.

The original was over 6 hrs.

[Lone Pawn]

7. The original radio show was two hours.

And did *not* suck.

[cprise]

13. There were several seasons.

Also the TV miniseries was quite long.

But 90 min. is just too short to cover 2hrs worth of material that was originally aimed at a non-ADD audience.

I think people will like it. But I'm being cautious anyway... I'm going to a matinee.

[silvermachine]

9. Sounds like a case of...

..."worst episode ever!"
I'll make my own mind up when I see it.

[rock]

11. Bummer

[supernova]

12. Wow! That's hurtful

I did notice watching the trailer, however, how serious the movie appears to be.

It would be a very poor way to treat Douglas Adams, who did write the original screenplay, to turn his work into something it most definitely is not... nor should be.

I await with great curiosity.

[ET Awful]

14. So what he's saying is that it's almost, but not quite, entirely unlike

the Hitchhikers Guide?

[supernova]

15. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

PERFECT!! :7 :rofl:

[Lone Pawn]

16. LOL! Yes, I suppose so.

[Squatch]

17. Here's another review...one man's trash is another's treasure

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=19282

[Lone Pawn]

18. Hadn't seen that. Gives me hope.

I don't place much stock in Ain't It Cool after Harry promised that Episode II was the most intelligently plotted of the Star Wars films. The most viscerally exciting and thrilling of the Star Wars films. And frankly the most entertaining of the Star Wars films and that Alexander was an exceptional film, but that was always Harry ranting about how delightful he found crap. I have more faith in Moriarty, so that's reason for hope right there.

[SheepyMcSheepster]

19. cool, thanks for posting. eom

[crispini]

20. Alan Rickman's in it?

I'm there. I would attend a dramatic reading of the phone book if Alan Rickman did it. :7

edited to add: Damn, just read the review and I see he's playing the voice of Marvin. :P Oh well.

[jmowreader]

21. Movies from popular books always suck

There's a reason for that: the people who know the books and love them expect the movies to be Exactly Like The Book. Which can't happen.

Quick example: The Running Man. It is an Arnold Schwarzenegger gratuitous-violence movie based very loosely on a book Stephen King wrote under a pseudonym. Go over to imdb.com and pull up the reviews of The Running Man. Almost all of them were written by fans of the Bachman version of the story, and all of those people hated the movie--because it wasn't Exactly Like The Book.

OTOH, if they would have made a cinematic Running Man that was exactly like the book, it would have been the longest movie in history and it would have made six dollars because it would have been unwatchable. (Attention, Richard Bachmann fans: very few people are going to pay $8 to watch someone take a physical or lay in a HVAC duct, and there are huge sections of that book where Richards does exactly those things.) The movie they made, starring Richard Dawson as history's most evil game show host, was the highest-grossing film the year it came out.

BTW, I wonder why no one has mentioned the book version of The Running Man when they talk about literary forewarnings of 9/11. Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor (where the Japanese pilot Sato flew a 747 into the US Capitol) is often mentioned, but the end of The Running Man contans a sequence where Richards hijacks an airplane and flies it into The Games Building to take out Dan Killian.

[Lone Pawn]

22. Lord of the Rings.

nt

[jmowreader]

26. Exactly. And a lot of other books.

I think it was a mistake to make movies named after books in Tolkien's Trilogy--simply because those books have legions of fans with no sense of humor. "Oh My God! That character picked up the sword with his left hand. Everyone knows he always fought with his right hand. This movie really sucks!"

Could they have made more money by producing the same movie with a different title?

Now, there are books you can really fuck with and not bother too many people. One of my very favorite books is Barbarians at the Gate. The story of the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout. HBO made a movie from it, and I liked the movie too. If they would have made a movie directly from that book no one would have liked it because of how technical the book was--it was written by two reporters from the Wall Street Journal.

[Lone Pawn]

27. Certainly they couldn't have made more money without the title.

The LoTR story is what carried the movies, and the name brought it quite a bit of recognition--from non-fans, who would at least recognize the name, from casual fans, who would see it and enjoy it, and from hardcore fans, who would see it 3 times and then bitch about it for months on the Internet.

[Worst Username Ever]

23. ALL Remakes of cult classics get ripped to shreds by loyalists.

I can't imagine this would be any different.

[Lone Pawn]

24. Very true.

Still, this guy claims to have enjoyed all other adaptations of HG2G. I suppose that movies are different, though...more hype.

[GOPBasher]

25. Well, that kills my enthusiasm to see it. Crap! n/t

[SkipNewarkDE]

28. Ravings of a Fan-boy

Relax. These are the ravings of some dumbass fan-boy. It reminds me of the aging Star Wars geeks who liked the movies in the '70's and '80's, and fondly remembered them to be WAY better than they actually WERE, subsequently trashing the later installments.

[Abelman]

29. The Difference

is that Adams hasn't been watching over this. He only wrote the first draft of the screenplay.

The book and radio show were both funny. I didn't much care for the TV series as my MTV riddled mind found it too slow. Yeah, that's right. I know I can't handle slow-pacing anymore and it angers me! But to be on topic, I still think this movie looks pretty good and I'm going to see it and I'll probably hate it. But thems the breaks.