The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

The Plaid Adder
plaidder@mindspring.com

Every once in a while you hear that some famous figure you remember from your childhood has died unexpectedly and far too young. Usually it doesn't really make much of an impact beyond an, "Aw, crap." There are two famous people I can think of whose untimely deaths really did hit me with a sense of loss, and even anger that they had been taken out of the world before they could put more into it. One was Jim Henson, and the other was Douglas Adams.

The film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy continues both their legacies; it is, obviously, adapted from Douglas Adams's radio-series-turned-novel (partly by Adams himself), and the creature effects are done by the Jim Henson workshop. In a way, it's kind of an odd collaboration; the Muppet view of the universe was always considerably, well, warmer and fuzzier than the one Adams created. I never heard the radio show, but my friend Kevin introduced me to the books when we were in high school, and it truly was a formative experience. I had never read anything like it. Being an earnest, idealistic, and very serious-minded young misfit, I usually hated books that came across as cynical or nihilistic, but I could not resist The Hitchhiker's Guide. It was just so bizarre, so fresh, and above all, gut-bustingly funny. What got to me most was not the plot or the characters but the writing itself. I still remember one line from Adams's description of the Vogon fleet hovering menacingly in the sky just before they destroy the earth: "The ships hung in the sky much the way that bricks don't."

I was, therefore, pretty skeptical about the whole movie project. I had always assumed there simply was no way to translate the experience of reading Adams's writing to the big screen (or the small one). Then there is the matter of plot. Adams's novels don't have plots; plotlessness is their point. The whole message of the HG books is that you better try to enjoy the ride because there is no destination. All the illusions that a plot creates-- continuity, causality, coherence, depth, revelation, enlightenment, closure--are blown to smithereens once you widen your focus to include the cosmos. Plot is a human thing. Once the earth blows up, it's gone.

If you're gonna make a movie in this day and age, though, you need a plot; and so any attempt to film the series was bound to be a kind of devil's bargain. From one point of view, you could look at this film and say that it's a compromise bound to please no one; it's not enough like a normal Hollywood summer sci-fi blockbuster to draw in a new audience, and it's not faithful enough to the spirit of the original to make the fans happy. But rather than taking the Marvin view of things, what I would say is that the film got it right enough. I enjoyed it, would happily see it again, and would recommend it to anyone familiar with the series. How it plays to people who have never read the books, I cannot really say, though I can hazard a couple of guesses.

The film does in fact have a plot, and it is this: Just before the earth is destroyed by the Vogons (an alien race of big green blubbery bureaucrats) to make way for an intergalactic bypass, hapless Englishman Arthur Dent and his best friend Ford Prefect (who has been living as a human on earth for a while, but is actually from a planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he had originally claimed) hitch a ride off the planet in the hold of one of the Vogon ships. Eventually they are picked up by the Heart of Gold, a magnificent new spaceship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive, which allows the ship to travel anywhere in the universe instantaneously, but also has an annoying habit of transforming the crew temporarily into various highly improbable things (some of those sequences are pretty funny; I won't ruin them for you). The HOG is being 'captained' by Zaphod Beeblebrox, President of the Galaxy, played by Sam Rockwell as a perpetually dazed and confused bleached-blonde rock star who is long on charisma but short on clue. Also on board is Trisha MacMillan, now known as Trillian, a girl Arthur met and was much smitten with at a party a few weeks ago. Zaphod wants to get to the legendary planet of Magrathea, where he believes he will find the ultimate question (we already know the answer, which is 42). Arthur Dent wants a cup of tea, and he wants to get with Trillian, who he believes is The One. Everyone else is basically just trying to stay alive, which becomes increasingly difficult.

Most of this is already in the book; what's different is the development of the Arthur/Trillian romance, which is supposed to fill up the gaping hole at the center of the film where the meaning is supposed to be. Since Trillian was always the least interesting character, and since she hasn't really grown much in the transfer to celluloid, the romance isn't particularly compelling, though the actor playing Arthur Dent does manage to give his character a nerdly, rabbitty, loser's charm that imbues his love for her with a dignity which comes across as poignantly absurd. Another thing that's changed is the increased emphasis (and screen time spent) on the Vogons and their home planet. The film does milk a lot of genuine humor out of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Vogosphere (steeling himself to save the day, Arthur says, "I'm British. I know how to queue"); but by now we're so familiar with that kind of humor that I kept having Brazil flashbacks. Much more effective is the Magrathea sequence, which I will just let you see for yourself.

Despite these attempts to pull back from the brink of Adams's cynicism, I think the film does do a fairly good job of capturing the spirit and flavor of the novels. As soon as you get to the opening number, for instance (no, it's not a musical, but there is an opening number), you know you're not in Kansas any more, or even in Dagobah. Like the book, the film is regularly interrupted by vignettes from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, illustrated with clever two-dimensional animations and read by Stephen Fry. Because they're the closest to Adams's voice, they are often the funniest parts of the film; for my money, the best part is a late sequence involving the internal monologue of a touchingly optimistic sperm whale. Alan Rickman's voice is perfect for Marvin, Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox are exactly as you would imagine them, and in some ways the Magrathea sequence renders the unsettling emptiness of Adams's universe more effectively than the novel does; the more the screen fills with color and light, the more you shiver in the knowledge of just how stupid we were to ever imagine that humanity mattered.

For these reasons, though, this film doesn't really work like a 'normal' movie, and this is probably bound to turn off a lot of viewers who don't know the original. The humor is more dry than laugh-out-loud. Anyone who's hung up on a plot hanging together or making sense will no doubt be tremendously frustrated by, say, John Malkovich's ultra-creepy cameo as Zaphod's defeated electoral rival, which pretends to set up a plot arc which is then pretty much obliterated. With this film as with Monty Python, you're either going to get it, or you won't, and I'm thinking a large portion of the American moviegoing populace will be in the second category. And in fact the film reminds me a lot of Monty Python's _Meaning of Life,_ another loosely plotted exploration of large philosophical questions that ends by laughing at you for having ever expected meaning. Still, I'm glad I went, and would encourage other Adams fans to go too. If you're not an Adams fan, well, I guess what I would say is go read the book instead. It costs less, and who knows, it may completely change your life--or at least the way you look at writing, the universe, and everything.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder