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Film
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
To paraphrase some classic movie parlance, this long-awaited adaptation of British author Douglas Adams’ classic series is akin to Episode I – Revenge of the Storyteller.
Friday, April 29, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Touchstone Pictures
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Hitching a very long ride
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It’s an interesting coincidence that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the long-awaited adaptation of the late Douglas Adams’ acclaimed science-fiction serial (and later, novel), arrives in theaters on the eve of George Lucas’ last installment in his interminable Star Wars saga.
Adams’ radio broadcasts began the year after Hollywood’s original ‘space opera’ debuted, and will now enjoy the luxury of preceding the series’ last cinematic gasp, thereby as much highlighting the weaknesses of Lucas’ legacy as the strengths of Adams’. Because unlike the various iterations of Lucas’ vision that have come sprawling across googolplex screens for the past four decades, Hitchhiker reveals a master storyteller who still has a firm grasp on the essential humanity of his characters, no matter how farfetched and wholly alien they are in their conception.
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Touchstone Pictures
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From Elf to the viscinity of ALF
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In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I’ve never read any of Adams’ books, and am actually eagerly awaiting Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. But as I got lost in the details of Adams’ polysyllabic characters and their idiosyncratic peccadilloes, writ large on a silver screen that’s played host to far too many derivative, unnecessarily complex and miserably dull sci-fi epics in recent years, I rediscovered how effectively a storyteller can explore a fantastic world when they expand upon the original conceptual literary building blocks rather than find themselves limited by them. Specifically, Adams - and by extension, the filmmakers - seem to possess little interest in science-fiction, which works wonders in creating a believable atmosphere for the farfetched stuff to flourish.
Martin Freeman (Love Actually) plays Arthur Dent, quite possibly the unlikeliest action hero in the history of sci-fi adventure (in Star Wars, he would most definitely have been one of the locals Luke left behind on Tatooine when he went off to fight the Empire). Waking to the sound of a phalanx of bulldozers set to demolish his house and make way for a freeway, Arthur throws himself on the ground and plans to protest until the road workers disperse. Before he can stage a proper sit-in, however, his pal Ford Prefect (Mos Def) arrives and spirits him away to a local pub, where he explains that (a) he’s not an out-of-work actor but an alien in disguise, and (b) the world as Arthur knows it is scheduled for destruction in less than ten minutes.
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Touchstone Pictures
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One of Rockweel's best roles
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While Arthur would rather reminisce about his failed attempt to woo a girl named Tricia (Zooey Deschanel), Ford insists they abandon earth and hitch a ride to a safer planet. But instead of a safe haven, the pair soon land in the grasp of the Vogons, a race of bureaucratic aliens who take pleasure in torturing their captives with readings of egregiously bad poetry. Escaping with their eardrums intact, Arthur and Ford join the crew of the Heart of Gold spaceship, where the self-kidnapped President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), presides with oily, vacuous charm over chronically depressed robot Martin and the aforementioned Tricia, now renamed Trillian. Before long, this motley crew are racing across the galaxy to find, Jeopardy-style, the question to an age old answer.
For viewers unfamiliar with Adams’ source material, prepare yourself for a sci-fi movie of less than epic proportions. Director Garth Jennings, working from a screenplay written by Adams himself, has concocted anything but a heroic saga as he wisely avoids embracing either exclusively straightforward narrative cohesion or the wanderlust approach of the source material’s many digressions. The ‘story,’ as it is, unfolds like a convergence of prismatic non-sequiturs, expanding with each turn of events and ultimately following its own path. But it is the very human interactions of its central characters that elevate Hitchhikers beyond the ranks of its recent competition and power a wonderful mishmash of manic, inspired sequences.
At the same time, the film is deceptively complex, with both nothing going on at any one time and everything taking place concurrently. But it matters not. Exploding planets and poetry-spouting Vogons notwithstanding, it is Arthur and Trillian’s palpable chemistry that frames the plot’s otherwise convoluted business.
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Touchstone Pictures
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Still being Malkovich
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The actors, thankfully, aren’t mere chess pieces for the filmmaker’s stratagems, but entities unto themselves (a rare feat in a film of any genre). Arthur, for the most part, is simply along for the ride of his life; mostly distracted by his infatuation with Trillian, he pines quietly for her and pretends, successfully, to be unimpressed by the radical scope of the adventure into which he is cast.
Ford, meanwhile, is the obvious catalyst for the meeting of the minds - and hearts - between Arthur, Trillian, and later, Zaphod, but never seems ancillary to the action; rather, he functions as proprietor of privileged information, doled out in sparing doses (which as chronicler for the Guide, he should be), and yet interacts as a companion and co-conspirator rather than fount of exposition.
In the end, one glance at the mess of syllables that comprise the characters’ names confirm that very little of this universe was designed for the purpose of meaning very much. Unlike Lucas’ landscape of half-formed words (in-Vader, in-Sidious, etc.) and indulgent postmodernism, Adams appeared interested in constructing a world that functions without needing a handbook on the history of cinema, much less a toy store catalog, to discern its particulars.
Rather, in-vest in at least one showing of Hitchhiker’s Guide, if for no other reason than to stave off anticipation for Episode III; you might even find that the film further in-spires your fervor for Lucas’ latest epic. But make no mistake; there won’t be a more in-vigoratingly human and in-comparably entertaining science fiction film produced this year.
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