Monday, May 16, 2005

Hitchhiker's Guide

Kevin has posted his detailed and insightful review of the five-book trilogy.

We saw the movie (finally!) Saturday. Mostly, it left me flat. There was some good, true. (Spoilers ahoy!)
  • I think they handled the "Zaphod has two heads and three arms" thing about as well as one could expect.
  • I liked the way they threaded a romance into the story. (Because what's a movie without a romance? Without a romance, you're left with crap like "Saving Private Ryan" or "To Kill A Mockingbird".)
  • I like the fact that Zaphod sounded disturbingly like a coked-up George Bush.
  • Yay for the cameo appearance by the original Marvin, standing in queue on Vogsphere, and that of Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent, as the Magrathean hologram.
  • Bill Nighy was excellent as Slartibartfast.
That said, something was seriously wrong, and I have to blame the lead-role casting. Martin Freeman, as Arthur, completely failed to capture the air of righteous British indignation that Simon Jones delivered so perfectly. Instead of a British everyman, he was just an Everyman. Mos Def as Ford really failed to sell a lot of his lines. And Zooey Deschanel, while adorable, was exactly not how I envisioned Trillian (who was a brilliant astrophysicist in the previous incarnations of the story, and here is, um, just this girl Arthur falls for, with no backstory whatsoever, which isn't Zooey's fault, so I'll go back to finding her adorable).

The John Malkovich plotline felt bolted on as filler (which, in fairness, it was).

posted by MeanMrMustard @ 2:44 PM