Okay, so have I been punked or was really supposed to be Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I'm only asked because the movie I saw this afternoon was titled "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy." And it characters had the right names. And the Vorgon Poetry was, in fact, pretty awful. Beyond that, though, the current Hitchhiker's movie seems like something about as distant from the original work as the Starship Troopers movie did. Well, may be it wasn't quite that far gone. Too close for comfort, though.
Low lights: The romance between Arthur and Trillian was way over played. Cheesy. Zaphod styled as a Zapp Brannigan Pez dispenser. Hideous. The "Point of View Gun?" They really should have called it "the utterly useless plot device." As if. Worst, all too frequently I found myself thinking "WTF!" instead of "Wow, this is great."
But what really pained me was the lack of parts of the story that Adam's detoured us of on that made the whole thing so complete absurd as to be completely enthralling. None of that -- other than maybe the Whale and the Bowl of Petunias -- was to be found at all in this movie. Everything was about moving the movie, not the plot, along.
Highlights: Thread Arthur vomiting. Priceless. Classic Marvin -- the one from the BBC series -- standing in line. Good tribute to that series. And Mos Def doing a great job as Ford, I thought. And I don't know if they could have found a better voice for the Honda Asimov meets an iMac form of Marvin that Warwick Davis.
The ending made it all too clear that this was just a setup for next movie. That's just too depressing, because if its as unfaithful to original as this was, it would rather clearly be the movie at the end of the franchise for me. And the probability, sadly, of that, seems to be 21.7 million to one. $27.1 million dollars, that is. Normality is over rated.
But in the end, this Marvin had the zinger for this movie, when they found Magrathea: "Incredible... it's even worse than I thought it would be."