The best parts of the Hollywood version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are the toys.
The Improbability Drive transforms objects and beings into flowers, fish, sofas and everything else before rearranging them into the right form in another place. Each switch results in a sweet popping noise, like pulling the lid from a jar of fresh preserves.
The Guide itself is like an e-book, but with colorful Flash-y animations and a ribald sense of humor. And the Babel Fish is bigger than you'd expect -- you have to apply some force to jam it into your ear. (A few of you might not know this: The fish swims around your brain, serving as an automated Berlitz for all the languages of the galaxy.)
Other than that, fans of Douglas Adams' series of Hitchhiker's books (he wrote five of them, and -- typical! -- called it a trilogy) won't find too many happy surprises in this new film. Hitchhiker's Guide, the film, is brisk, atmospheric and often amusing -- an agreeable, standard-issue sci-fi comedy that strings together many of the good comic bits from the series of novels.
But director Garth Jennings misses the opportunity to send his movie into a deeper space. This Hitchhiker's Guide is spoofy, not scientific, big on effects and light on metaphysical musings.
It's good for a few laughs, but it would be a stretch to call this Hitchhiker's Guide inventive or smart -- two of the first words that come to mind when describing Adams' books.
The movie, with a screenplay by the dearly departed Adams (he died in 2001, at 49) and Karey Kirkpatrick, follows the strange journey of an Earthling named Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) who suddenly finds himself aboard a spaceship.
Dent has just discovered that his planet is being demolished to make way for an intergalactic expressway. His friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def), who owes him a favor, rescues him.
Ford isn't from Earth, as he has told Dent; he's a writer for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a space-age Lonely Planet. And, moments before the Earth is blasted to bits, he beams himself and Arthur aboard a Vogon demolition craft.
Soon, thanks to the Improbability Drive, we are following the quest of Galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell) as he, with Ford, Dent and Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) tagging along, search for the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything. (The answer, and this won't spoil the movie for anyone, is 42.)
The movie is filled with potentially delightful stuff -- there's enough adventure and weirdness for a franchise. But Jennings doesn't translate Adams' peculiar tone to the screen, nor does he create a coherent style of his own to fill the void.
Granted, making movies from Adams' novels can't be easy. The books are episodic and digressive, never passing up a side trip or the chance to investigate a diverting philosophical curiosity. Hollywood, of course, demands much more structure, so this Hitchhiker's Guide is rebuilt as a sci-fi/spoof/romance/buddy film.
Adams had a knack for describing thorny space-time problems and then squeezing them until they sprayed out juicy absurdity. The novels could be silly -- Adams was a comedy writer -- but they also made dark sport of humans' self-importance. We look pretty small, he constantly reminded us, against the backdrop of a nearly infinite galaxy.
The movie never feels as black as the books. Instead, it plays like a Saturday morning cartoon, minus the violence. The film's villains, the Vogons, are hideous bureaucrats, but Jennings fails to make them even an eensy bit scary. (The Guide tells us that Vogons use poetry as a form of capital punishment, but we see one performance, and it's not all that awful.)
There are some lovely bits, including a trip through a workshop where planets are built (on a newly made Earth, the oceans are filled with a hose, and Australia's Ayers Rock painted red with a brush). But even this moment doesn't have the weight it should, since everything before and after has been played for laughs.
The soundtrack consists of clucky, orchestrated music that could have been lifted from a sitcom pilot. And Jennings tells and retells the same jokes -- the depressive robot Marvin delivering a variation on the same punch line at the end of a dozen or so scenes.
Funnier bits include a scene with the supercomputer Deep Thought, who looks like an updated Easter Island figure and is addicted to cartoons, and a church whose prayers revolve around sneezing.
John Malkovich plays the guru of this flock, which replaces "amen" with "achoo." At the moment he pops out from behind a table, his bodiless head carried aloft on spidery, mechanical legs, we catch a glimpse of what the Hitchhiker's Guide movie could have been.
That scene is creepy, funny and, in its own weird way, beautiful -- a rare moment of inspiration in a movie that deserves many more of them.
