The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Starring Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel

Written by Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatric

Directed by Garth Jennings

To we members of the Tribe, Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series held a place second only to Tolkien as Sacred Text. The books weren't great literature, nor were they particularly filling; you could read the original trilogy in a weekend, or in a handful of sessions on the toilet. But they were snot-drippingly funny, particularly to us pencil-neck geeks who thought jokes about morose robots, happy Vertical People Movers, restaurants at the end of the universe and galactic presidents with two heads and three arms were the epitome of highbrow humor. Learning and exchanging all the best bits from the books scored you major points around the Dungeons and Dragons table.

Look, I'm giving you all of this ammunition to use against me because I want you to understand how desperately I wanted to love this film. When I read that Adams himself had been working on the screenplay until his untimely death in 2001, I allowed myself to feel cautiously hopeful. When I heard that Sam "Guy Fleegman" Rockwell had been cast as Zaphod, and Martin Freeman as Arthur, I wept with joy. I was more suspicious of Mos Def as Ford— I had nothing against casting a black man in the role, but Def seemed to take away from the essential Britishness of the thing.

Then I saw the trailer, which appeared to show all of the elements in place for a faithful, scathingly hilarious adaptation, and I nearly popped a load in my pants. My expectations were beyond the pale, it's true. But where The Hitchhiker's Guide was concerned, could we members of the Tribe accept anything less than a home run?

The story introduces us to nondescript Englishman Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), who is attempting to save his home from being demolished to make way for a new freeway bypass. Ironically enough, at that very moment the interstellar Vogon Constructor Fleet has arrived in orbit around Earth in preparation to demolish the planet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Fortunately for Arthur, his best friend is Ford Prefect (Mos Def), who is actually an alien who happens to write for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that singularly indispensable interstellar guidebook that regularly outsells the Encyclopedia Galactica despite containing many entries that are "apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate."

Ford's expertise in hitching rides on spaceships lands them first on a Vogon ship, where they meet the hideously alien and bureaucratic Vogons and are subjected to the dreaded Vogon Poetry Torture. Finally they wind up on board the Heart of Gold, a stolen spaceship powered by the experimental Improbability Drive and crewed by on-the-lam President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), fellow Earthling Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) and Marvin (voice of Alan Rickman) the perpetually depressed robot. The cast then embark on a quest of sorts to discover the true nature of the late great planet Earth before the Vogons can wipe out the last two remaining Earthlings.

That’s a terrific setup, and it’s faithful to the book. But I'm sorry to report that this picture is, for the most part, a crushing failure. It starts out promisingly enough with a musical ode to the Dolphins, who are fleeing Earth ahead of its impending destruction, called "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish." That's an inside-baseball reference from one of the later Hitchhiker books that seems designed as an olive branch to fans. "Trust us," this opening numbers says. "We know what we're doing."

Uh, no. That the project is not in good hands becomes apparent in the first 15 minutes. From the destruction of the Earth onward, nothing pays off. Scenes that are sidesplitting in the book become perfunctory and flaccid on screen. Nearly every joke falls flat. Part of the problem is context; I'm not sure how much of Douglas's draft of the screenplay made it to the screen, but it certainly appears as if whole sections have been tossed out. What we’re left with are a bunch of random bits cribbed from the book: either jokes in search of punch lines, or punch lines devoid of setup. This makes for depressingly few laughs. It’s not enough merely to mention the Improbability Drive and throw in a few unexplained gags around it— grasping the concept is essential to understanding what makes it funny and why it’s so important to the plot. Here, it’s tossed off and then quickly forgotten.

That’s just one example. The film is lousy with missing pieces, and liberally quotes from the lyrics without giving us any of the music. I can’t fault the cast, who all try very hard— Rockwell’s Zaphod is a loving tribute to the character in the books, Freeman is perfectly cast, and Bill Nighy’s Slartibartfast is a wonderfully arch creation. The fall guy here has to be rookie director Garth Jennings and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith. These guys understand neither comic timing nor visual inventiveness, and they have no idea how to bring the witty heart of this material to the fore. Instead, we get a film that won’t satisfy the fans and will befuddle the masses. That’s not a formula for success. Imagine this material in the hands of Terry Gilliam, and you can imagine what might have been.

What made The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in its various radio, television and print incarnations, more than just Monty Python in Space was Douglas Adams’s essential humanity, which always shone through the ironic twists and clever wordplay. His message was always front and center, emblazoned on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide itself: “Don’t Panic.” The universe is unimaginably vast, we human beings unimaginably small and trivial in comparison, and if you seriously sit down and contemplate your place in the universe, the only logical conclusion you can draw is existential despair. All of human creation— Shakespeare, Mozart, the Sistine Chapel, The Apprentice— means less than nothing to the universe. One Vogon constructor fleet could end it all in a heartbeat.

But Adams teaches us to celebrate our insignificance. Don’t panic! Cherish who you are, where you are and everyone you love, because in a universe of incomprehensible size, these are the only things that matter. That’s why us geeks love him so much. This film misses that message entirely, and that’s why it sucks. But the books, fortunately, will live on. Much as in The Hitchhiker’s Guide entry for Earth, the movie version can be summed up in two words: Mostly Harmless.

May 10, 2005
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