The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Director: Garth Jennings (music video director. Have you seen Blur’s Good Song or Coffee & TV? That’s him).
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman

Very quickly: Just before Earth is blown up (people just hate us don’t they?), loser Arthur Dent is saved by his friend Ford Prefect who it turns out is a travel writer for a kind of Intergalactic Lonely Planet.

So easy to fuck up, this one.

The books were just hilarious and the stuff that made it so was Douglas Adam’s ingenious (and frequent use) of what I call the VCR effect of books. You know, when a nuclear reactor’s about to go critical and you press the mental pause button so you can explain how the scientific process works. Hitchhiker’s was funny cos Adam’s would write 2 pages of rather unrelated nonsense and then something explodes/dies/jumps into hyperspace.

Well, the clever clogs at Shynola (they do loads of music videos and TV commercials) solve most of that stuff with cutaways showing animated cartoon sequences of the Guide explaining say, what a Vogon is or how a Babelfish translates.

Visually, the movie’s quite nice. Jim Henson’s creature fellows did a smashing job with the Vogons (see, you can have a nice movie without CGI) and Marvin is the anti-C3P0. In fact, the human characters seem pretty much incidental. Nobody really turns in a notable performance; Martin Freeman’s a good Arthur Dent, but ain’t straining since he plays pretty much the same character in The Office, lotsa people said “Why Mos Def?” I say, didn’t make a damn difference i.e. no harm done, Sam Rockwell has lotsa fun though with his rock star-like President of the Universe.

And now I get all selfish and talk about the extremely cute Zooey Deschanel. Whom I never noticed before but will now. That tracksuit thingie she was wearing was very 80s Buck Rogers but hey, who the fuck cares? She’s hot. Damn.

Ahem. Right. Moving on.

Movie’s alright. Mostly flat. They do some interesting things (musicals, mixed medium stuff including one weird ass sequence where the movie becomes into a stop-motion sock puppet film). An dthe bit where they show the factory floor of Magrathea where they manufacture planets is very nice. But mostly, a smirk every now and again with no real nice feeling at the end. The end incidentally, probably isn’t because you smell 'sequel' long before the credits roll.

Zooey Deschanel however is very, very cute.