The Pinoy Atheist in Multiply

Reviewed By Jay Seaver
Directed by: Garth Jennings
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, action and mild language.
Distributor: Touchstone Pictures


One can be forgiven for not actually believing that a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie has actually been made. After all, the first paperback copy of the book I read in elementary school, about two decades ago, had a "soon to be a major motion picture" sticker on the front cover. At the time, it seemed likely enough - it had already been a radio show, a book, a television program, a record album that differed from the radio show, and a computer game. And yet it languished in development purgatory, with Michael Nesmith never seeming to find the money, Jay Roach never seeming to find the time, and writer Douglas Adams dropping dead of a heart attack while working out at the gym, an end he probably would have been amused by, though he (like us all) would have preferred it happen much, much later. My college-age brother was anxious to see it and wasn't born when the process began.

But, wonder of wonders, a movie has actually been made. A good one, too, with an appealing cast, many of Adams words (indeed, often whole sentences and even paragraphs) intact, excellent design, and much of the same sense of whimsy that made this story delightful in all of its iterations. That's a big accomplishment, since Adams's voice was distinctive: Playfully intelligent, cynical without being bitter, unrepentantly atheistic but still seeing the universe as full of beauty and wonder. Film is a highly collaborative medium, more so than any of the others, and it's easier for a writer's voice to get drowned out. Here, Adams isn't so much drowned out as much as music video director Garth Jennings and a team of production/costume/set designers elaborate on the ideas he tended to give a sentence or two before moving on to the next one. Adams's fingerprints are still all over the movie - other than adaptations of stage plays, I can't remember the last film where so much of the dialog came directly from the source material - but the visuals are all Jennings & company.

It's tempting to attribute to Karey Kirkpatrick, who revised the screenplay after Adams' death, the elements that bring the movie closest to the standard big-budget template. It's probably not completely fair, since Adams has changed the story every time he brought it to a new medium, but when so much of the film is eccentric, it's the more conventional elements that stand out. I also find it interesting that this is probably the most linear version of Hitchhiker yet; reading the books is a sensation not completely unlike surfing the web, as Adams would just drop something peculiar in the middle of the narrative, then quote the fictional Guide entry for it, which would lead to something else, until he brought things back to the main story. The movie still includes many of the book's digressions, but stops short of linking the digressions together or going into the digressions from the digressions. There's also a romantic subplot for Arthur and Trillian that wasn't in previous versions.

Ah, there I go, assuming the reader is familiar with the story already, which may not be the case (in which case you are unfortunate to have lived so long without it and lucky to have some great reading in your future). In short, Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) is in rather a state because his house is about to be knocked down. His friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) arrives at Arthur's house, finds him laying in front of a bulldozer, and tells him that it's worse than that; the whole planet, in fact, is scheduled to be demolished for a hyperspace bypass, which Ford knows because he's an alien from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. They escape when Ford beams them onto one of the ships that destroys the Earth, but are soon cast into the airless void of space, where at the very last possible second they are rescued, in a highly improbably manner, by Ford's cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), Ford's two-headed-president-of-the-galaxy-cousin who stole a ship, and Tricia "Trillian" McMillan (Zooey Deschanel), his traveling companion whom Arthur once met at a party. Then, things get weird, as they're brought along on Zaphod's quest for the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

I'm impressed with the casting, mostly because the actors are all, with the exception of Alan Rickman as the perpetually-depressed voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android, pretty far from what I've imagined during this film's long germination period: Freeman is too young, Rockwell only seldom displays the prosthetics necessary for an extra head and arm, while Mr. Def and Ms. Deschanel are too, well, American. Surprisingly, though, it mostly works. Freeman is probably the weakest link as Arthur, never really reacting quite as strongly as the situation would seem to demand. Mos Def nails Ford, though, managing to make his character alien in body language and thought process despite his human appearance. Freeman is all manic, stupid energy as Zaphod, once again showing how amazing it is that the world barely acknowledges his existence as a hilarious comic actor.

Then there's Zooey Deschanel, who seems to have taken forever to get her big break but really hasn't; it's just that she's done three or for movies a year and been so memorable in in those movies, whether bit parts like in The Good Girl or leads like All the Real Girls, that the time seems to be right for her to make the big leagues. She's not what I expected of Trillian, but the thing is, Trillian in the source material is barely a character; she disappears somewhere around the second book and is barely recognizable when she returns (the character is served well by the changes to the story). Deschanel makes her a vital part of the ensemble.

If the movie had been made twenty years ago, it wouldn't just have had a different cast, but would have looked somewhat different, although not as different as one might think: The effects are well-done, but not particularly CGI-intensive, though one of my favorite sequences is digital: A pull-back from Earth to show the Vogon constructor fleet around the planet which makes about fifty stops, a great gag on cinematic convention. The aliens are almost all animatronic or prosthetic, as is Marvin, who is given remarkable personality not just by Rickman's voice, but by Warwick Davis' physical performance, in spite of his simple design.

This movie won't become the definitive version of the story for those who watch it, but that's a good thing. It works very well as one version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and is charming in its own right. And I wouldn't have it any other way.