This review is based on a substantially complete version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy shown to a small group of journalists in London on 31st March 2005, to which I was invited by Buena Vista International and Digital Outlook. The generosity of these companies in paying for my travel to this screening is gratefully acknowledged. The opinions expressed here are the personal critical opinions of myself, author and journalist MJ Simpson. This review is based on a single viewing of the film; if any factual details have been misremembered, I am happy to amend those portions of the text. Because of its great length, this review has been split into four parts:

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

WARNING. This reviews contains many SPOILERS including the entire plot of the film.
A much shorter, spoiler-free review can be found here and a list of material which is in previous versions of the story but absent from the film can be found here.

Back on Earth Mark II, Slartibartfast delivers Arthur to ... Arthur's house, looking just as it did before the council knocked it down, complete with flowerbeds, lawns and a caravan in the front garden. This idea has its own problems. In the original story, Earth Mark II was being built from scratch and was going to have to run the whole vast programme to find the Question again, but it was never completed because the mice thought they had got their hands on a remnant of the original, ie. Arthur’s brain. The Earth on which Arthur ended up was the Earth Mark I, but in its beautiful, unspoiled, prehistoric state, thanks to time travel.

In the film it is not explicitly stated that the Earth was destroyed five minutes before completing its program, so it’s not clear how far along the programme had run. What is clear however is that in this version there is some sort of back-up file and the Earth will pick up from where it left off. Or rather, slightly before it left off - since Arthur's house is intact and there are no bulldozers around it. We see the same people in the same pub, waiting to come to life, so is this meant to be the same Thursday or not? If the whole Earth is part of a computer programme, including the people (no Golgafrinchans in this version) then the demolition of Arthur's house must be part of that programme.

Maybe I'm thinking too deeply about this, but at least I'm thinking about it which is more than anyone on the production seems to have done.

Inside Arthur's house, tucking into vast amounts of food and drink, are Zaphod, Ford and Trillian, plus those two mice that we saw earlier. The mice want Arthur's brain and when his three friends have collapsed into a drugged stupor, wrist clamps and a helmet appear from nowhere. Why do they want his brain? Your guess is as good as mine on that one. In the original story it was the last part of the computer left existing (apart from Trillian’s brain, which had left the planet earlier) so it was a sort of back-up that might allow the mice to retrieve the Question. But here we can see the Magratheans building a copy of the world exactly as it was a few days earlier, complete with all the people who were killed, so why can’t they just build another Arthur Dent? Like so much else in this film, this part of the story has been pointlessly messed around and now makes no sense.

An evil-looking combination of drills and circular saws now appears from under the cakes on the table and advances, wobbling somewhat, towards Arthur - but pauses briefly when he franticly suggests some possible questions, including, 'How many roads must a man walk down?' Then, just as the drill-saw-thing starts up again, he wrenches his hands free, throws off the helmet, knocks the drill-saw-thing away, grabs a bowl and squashes the two mice. So he escapes his peril not through any cleverness or morally superior position but simply because the wrist clamps weren't strong enough. Hmm, yes, that's a satisfying resolution. When he lifts the bowl, we see that the mice have briefly become tiny, flattened versions of Lunkwill and Fook, which then fade away.

With the other three now conscious again, though it's not clear how that happened, they head outside to be confronted by a squad of about 30-40 Vogon soldiers, plus Questular (who exists merely to give a sense of human scale in the all-Vogon scenes, but has no narrative purpose whatsoever) and Marvin who has led them there in some way and for some reason. As the soldiers blast inexpertly away, the gang take cover in Arthur's caravan, which Zaphod thinks is a spaceship and tries to fly, though all he manages to do is light the gas hob. This is not nearly as funny as it sounds. Marvin walks calmly across the lawn but is blasted in the back of the head and collapses, his eye-lights dimming. The Point of View Gun is just near him, too far away from the caravan for the others to reach. When it all looks like certain death, Marvin's eyes light up again, he stands up, picks up the POV gun and blasts it at the Vogons, who instantly become thoroughly depressed and collapse. (Although there were about 30-40 Vogons originally, a crane shot reveals about 200 CGI Vogons all falling over.)

As an epilogue, we see the last of the Vogons bundled off in a van, Zaphod chatting up Questular (whose crush on her boss has been hinted at but never really dealt with), and Slartibartfast asking Arthur if there is anything he wants changing about the Earth Mark II, which is so close to completion that they're going to finish it off anyway. Arthur says, "Yes, me." He wants to continue exploring the universe. He and Ford and Trillian and Marvin head off in the Heart of Gold to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the final gag being a change in direction when Marvin points out that the restaurant is at the other end of the universe (which of course makes no sense because it’s the ‘end’ in the sense of the final moments, so we can only assume that the film-makers haven't actually read as far as the second book).

That’s your lot. That’s the movie we’ve been waiting 26 years for. And let me tell you, it was not worth the wait, not for this. The whole film is true to neither the letter nor the spirit of Douglas Adams' books and scripts. And it really seems that many of the changes have been introduced for no reason at all. For example, the novel leads us into the story by saying that the tale 'begins very simply. It begins with a house' whereas in the film Stephen Fry's narration tells us that it ‘begins very simply. It begins with a man.' Even though, when Fry says this, we are looking at a house!

As narrator, Stephen Fry sounds, as I suspected he would, like Stephen Fry (although this won't be a problem for audiences outside the UK, unfamiliar with his ubiquitous presence on British TV and radio). More than that, he sounds like a straightforward narrator rather than the voice of an electronic book in Ford's pocket. Only once, on the Vogon ship, do we see the actual Guide in use and get any suggestion that the silky tones explaining things to us are related in some way to the device. Ford's employment as a researcher for the Guide is barely touched upon. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is almost entirely absent from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The graphics that accompany some of the narration are nicely done by the Shynola team, though they lack the complexity of the TV series graphics. What is most noticeable is the complete absence of several key Guide entries and the heavy editing of others. For example, although the one thing that Ford bothers to retrieve from Arthur's demolished house is a towel, and towels are mentioned on a few other occasions, there is no explanation of why a towel is important. This is just one of many omissions which will have neophytes scratching their heads and fans fuming.

The one thing which I haven’t addressed here is the Arthur-Trillian romance which, ironically for something which has worried the fans so much over the years, is really not a big deal. They don’t declare undying love for each other; there is in fact just one (fairly chaste) kiss right at the end. You don’t feel that they’re in love, just that there is some degree of attraction there. It really is the least of our worries.

You know, I really haven’t enjoyed writing such an intensely negative review of this film, but unlike certain websites and certain publications (mentioning no names but I think we all know who I’m talking about) my critical views are not swayed by the generosity of film companies. And I know that some people who saw preview screenings seem to have enjoyed this film, even adored it. There is, as they say, no accounting for taste. But I can only speak as I find. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m a dangerous maverick, or a grumpy old git, but maybe I’m the only one who can spot the Emperor’s new clothes for what they are.

Perhaps I’m too close to the story, perhaps over-exposure to Hitchhiker’s Guide has made me immune to its delights. (After all, I have been bemoaning for some time that it has dominated my life for four years now.) That would be a possibility, except that I watched the whole TV series on DVD last year and loved it; I thoroughly enjoyed the Tertiary Phase; and the original radio series and books still make me laugh. This isn’t a case of familiarity breeding contempt.

Recently I watched just a little bit of Episode Three of the TV series as preparation for a lecture I was giving and I found in it a sense of joy, a sense of delight, a sense of fun - something that is entirely missing from the movie. There was, for example, a wonderful chemistry between Zaphod and Ford (“I’m sorry, Zaphod old mate. I still don’t believe you?” “Why not?” “You tend to lie a lot.”) that I just didn’t see in their big screen incarnations. Although, as noted, Mos Def plays his role quite well, it’s not a role which is really Ford Prefect as we know him. You never, ever get the sense that the movie version of Ford wants to go to a party, which is really the intrinsic part of Ford’s character and certainly far more important than Zaphod calling him ‘Ix’.

Another thing that seems to be missing from the film is a sense that this is all taking place in a fantastic universe populated with every sort of conceivable lifeform, including (as Douglas put it) ‘humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids, and superintelligent shades of the colour blue’. The TV series, on a tiny fraction of the movie’s budget, managed to present us with a universe that swarmed with different races. On the big screen we get only a few background aliens glimpsed in the brief, night-time exterior scene when the Heart of Gold crew arrive on Viltvodle, but it’s all very dark and the long tracking shot through the crowd which they were filming when I visited the set has not made it into the final cut. Apart from that, there’s really just the handful of stiff puppets in the queue on Vogsphere to give us a clue that there are any lifeforms in this galaxy that aren’t either humanoid or Vogon.

This is simply not the universe that Douglas Adams created - a satirical universe which is recognisably like Earth but exaggerated. This is a universe where things are either exactly as they are on Earth or nothing like they are on Earth. The few non-humanoid aliens we do glimpse tend to be odd, abstract shapes rather than exotic variants of Earth-based lifeforms or objects. It’s as if someone had filmed Gulliver’s Travels but had made the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians normal-sized and turned the Houyhnhnms from talking horses into yellow triangles. The film-makers, to borrow a phrase, ‘just don’t get it.’

Above all, though, it is the rewriting of the original, highly quotable and much-quoted dialogue which leaves me gobsmacked. Good comedy writing is like poetry - it has a meter to it. It’s like the sound of train wheels. “Counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor” has a meter, as does “I know little of these ‘early sixties sitcoms’ of which you speak.” The bastardised lines to be found in this movie don’t have that meter, and it is profoundly obvious that they don’t, in the same way that you can hear a cracked wheel even if you’ve never been on that sort of train before. There’s just something that’s off and it doesn’t sound right.

I do believe that this movie was made by people who know, love and respect Douglas Adams’ work. I believe this because I know these people, and indeed knew several of them well before this movie went into production. (I’m not talking about the Adams estate here; I don’t have a great deal of respect for the Adams estate.) I know that the people making this film did not set out to completely ignore the source material, so why have they ended up with a movie which makes it look like that was their intention all along?

The Hitchhiker's movie is, in summary, a train-wreck of a film. The plot is strung together randomly without cause and effect or motivation. To some extent, I will grant you, that is also true of the source material: Douglas Adams had no qualms about moving his characters arbitrarily from one scenario to another and if you study the first couple of books as novels they simply don't work at all in terms of either plot structure or character development. But the great ideas and the wonderful use of language are together sufficient to gloss over such problems and people love the books despite their literary failings.

However, in the movie a lot of those great ideas have been either messed about with, so that they no longer make sense, or eliminated altogether and, worst of all - and I cannot emphasise this enough - the film-makers have taken most of the jokes out. They have taken the jokes out and replaced them with unfunny lines - jokoids - or in some cases really, really crap humour of the 'give me a hand' variety. Or sometimes not replaced them 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.

Long film review (WARNING: SPOILERS!): Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

Short film review (no spoilers)

Things that aren't in the movie