Saw it the first day it was out.
You are right in your comments. I thought it was well done but I was surprised at how uninteresting it was.
It has a few cool moments, I thought the implosion of Earth was pretty awesome, but these were few and far in between.
Probably for fans like us or persons who read the series, it was a little easier to digest; but also more disappointing to us.
Overall Problem:
I think part of the problem is that this is was one of the few movies that maybe could have benefited from straying AWAY from following the book. (most adaptations have the opposite problem of course).
The script was essentially too faithful and literal to the book. It is just simply impossible to make the genius and satire of the book translate well into a screenplay witth a literal approach and they shouldn't have tried to do that. They should have just taken the basic concepts and premise and got us into the Hitchhiker universe.
Specific Problems & Comments:
Dear Movie: Pick a Genre: Are you a Musical, Comedy, Romance, Thriller, Sci-Fi, Mystery, Space Opera, what? You can be one or maybe a combination of two but you can't be all of these and expect to be good.
The Narration and use of a Narrator was too obtrusive. Again while the extra info works well in a literary form, on screen it caused the flow of the plot to be disjointed and reminded you that you were watching a movie. It was almost like a commercial break which is not good when you are watching a film.
Too much of a good thing. The book is so densely packed with ideas and humour, etc. that by following the book so closely, we the audience didn't have time to appreciate or even follow these. Before you could say Babelfish they were talking about the Infinite Probability drive and so forth. Only those of us that read the books could even get a hint of how interesting these concepts were.
I thought the whole footage of the mice before the reveal at the end was a big mistake. This might just be because I, like anyone who read the books, knew their significance beforehand
Ford Prefect, bad casting choice, and very poor characterization. I don't know, I always saw Ford as a Galactic-wise traveller, a more rugged individual with a touch of sarcasm (that's how he has been portrayed in the previous versions) and not as a hammy, comedian doofus. I see him more like Harrison Ford not Ford Farlane.
Trillian was cute. I could give her and the casting director a thumbs-up for keeping it real and using the "girl next door" in the role but again, I had the preconceived notion that she should be a lot hotter.
Marvin was cute too but in this case too cute. I see more Marvin the Manic Depressive robot in C3PO then in this walking AIBO-Michelin Man hybrid.
I thought Arthur was perfectly cast and Zaphod was the best role and stole the show, until the last half when he was portrayed as mindless twit.
The special effects and costumes were fine. These were some of the best aspects of the movie.
In summary, I think Hitchhiker fans have to just be content to realize that no literal adaptation to film or television will fully capture the magic of the books. This is not Harry Potter. The best thing to do would be to just take some of the ideas and do a television series more like Sliders or Quantum Leap.
-Eduardo
