The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2005 "Don't leave Earth without it"
6.7| 1h49m| PG| en| More Info
Released: 29 April 2005 Released
Producted By: Spyglass Entertainment
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

Mere seconds before the Earth is to be demolished by an alien construction crew, Arthur Dent is swept off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher penning a new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

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Reviews

UnowPriceless hyped garbage
Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
aramis-112-804880 Lots of strange terms are slung around by this movie's reviewers, like "Hardcore Hitchchiker Fans" or that some of Adams' ideas are replaced by a "general silliness." Poppycock.I came to HITCHHIKER in college (early 80s), first by the dodgy tv series, then the books, then the kickoff radio series--which is my favorite HH incarnation. Though I collected books, records, tv shows and even the text-based video game (which I wasted hours playing and never won), my favorite part of Adam's ridiculous tour of the galazy is Zaphod's going to the Frogstar, then having the seance with his great-grandfather, then Arthur meeting Lintilla . . . stuff lots of HItchhiker fans who call themselves "hardcore" won't know anything about. Like the "Twin Peaks" fans who thought the Black Lodge was the important thing and loved "The Return" while the original fans who loved the original characters thought it was a travesty. In fact, in its original conception, the radio "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was meant to be, first and foremost, funny. Though because of his extremely tangential connections to "Monty Python" and "The Burkiss Way to Dynamic Living" (for which he penned one of the funniest sketches), Adams' chief influence was the humor writer P. G. Wodehouse, whose books had no other purpose in life but to bring people laugh. As Adams had in the beginning. And this movie has no other purpose but the excite and entertain and bring a few laughs (unfortunately, it places excitement over laughs, which is bad in my book).So, we have radio shows, television shows, books, plays, games, and . . . they're all different! Back in the day, as a young HH fan, when I quickly snapped up the newly published LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING, I hoped to find Lintilla in it. No such luck. All new versions disappoint the truly "hardcore" HH fans.That said, what about this new incarnation of "HItchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"? Well, it's amazing. Sam Rockwell is delightful as Zaphod. Mos Def isn't special as Ford, but Ford's purpose is basically exposition; he's never blatantly extraterrestrial apart from his knowledge, and that's Adams' fault. Martin Freeman's Arthur has little to do but look astonished, but think of the culture shock he's going through. Apart from Rockwell's weird and wild Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel is the best part. While not done up in a beautiful package like so many actresses, she brings more to Trillian than we get out of any other incarnation. In the original radio series she has so little to do (apart from bring the mice) she is eliminated from the second radio series without tears or a sense of loss. Zooey is like the woman ordinary Earthling Arthur Dent would fall for. And while her expressions are a bit over-acted for the big screen (even tv big screens, like I saw this movie on) she's the best Trillian yet.And BTW, I love the Vogons.Good things in the movie, without giving away too much: Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent and the actor most associated with the role, turns in a delightful, if brief, performance as the Magrathean pre-recorded video that warns the Heart of Gold away. I hoped that meant he would be Slartibartfast, but in fact that part is taken by the hilariously uncertain Bill Nighy. It's hard to think of these characters apart from their original actors, but Nighy makes Slartibartfast his own, neither duplicating nor downgrading Richard Vernon in other versions (but the true HITCHHIKER fan keeps all the different versions compartmentalized). Nighy comes in late and injects a humor the movie desperately needs at that point. And the view of Magrathea's planet workshop is truly impressive. It may suffer from the problem other movies had (the first "Star Trek" movie comes to mind) that wants to impress so much it doesn't contain much humor or story.Bad: Well, not much. The original radio series ran six episodes (with another six later). The tv series ran three hours. And there were five books in the trilogy and counting with new authors. Naturally, some people's favorite lines are deleted. Some of my favorite HH lines also bit the dust. But different media have different requirements, and a movie that comes in under two hours needs truncation.Since becoming a HITCHHIKER fanatic I had a conversion to Christianity, while Adams was a militant atheist; so I had a bit of difficulty swallowing all the Temple scenes. But I was impressed at the shortcuts the movie took to get through Magrathea and the way Trillian learned the fate of the Earth and Zaphod's part in it (which she never knew in the original radio series). And, of course, a movie must be both conclusive (in case it's the only movie) and open-ended (for sequels). I think it achieved that well, with Arthur and Trillian.Altogether, this movie is both fascinating, astounding, jaw-dropping, funny and . . . well, perhaps a little disappointing for "hardcore" Hitchhiker fans who followed Adams' funny little ride through the galaxy for thirty or forty years in various media), who miss their favorite things (it's amazing how territorial we can be!).Nevertheless, it's a perfect little introduction to Adams and his world to those who have the joy of entering it for the first time. So it's both not as much as it could have been (with all the background material available) and more than I expected. I avoided this movie for thirteen years because I never thought it could live up to the previous HH incarnations, and I feel it's thirteen years wasted. Not perfect, not really funny enough (in radio, on tv, and in the books Adams' world was much funnier). But the new material is entertaining and fits pretty well. Adams (who helped construct this little flick before his timely death) is the only author in history with such ability to revise his fiction!Still, don't stop here. The text-based video game I enjoyed will hardly be to modern tastes, but don't leave HH. here. Hit the radio show, the books and the television series, whose effects are as funny as Adams' writing.
invisibleunicornninja I'm surprised that this movie has so many bad reviews. This movie is pretty loyal to the book. Its extremely entertaining with well-acted characters and well-timed jokes. The cinematography, effects, and costumes are all fantastic. I don't see anything wrong with this movie, and am confused as to why other reviews are calling them boring.
kgratton The imagery in this film even caught the attention of my teenage son (briefly), but for someone who fondly remembers the books and BBC TV series it's simply too hard to watch this film without recalling that same TV series. An ideal film would have had Simon Jones as Arthur, David Dixon as Ford, Steven Fry as the narrator, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian - and a director who had a clue about comic timing, and was prepared to incorporate more material from the book, less new material that was a waste of screen time.Sorry to Martin Freeman, you're a great Bilbo, but you don't capture Jones' alternating mix of acerbic intellectualism and outright panic. Mos Def has none of Dixon's wide-eyed lunacy, and as much as I loved the work of the late Alan Rickman, he really should have watched the TV series as a primer for his voice-over of Marvin. Fry was great, and clearly must have been influenced by the TV series, and I think Rockwell did very well with what was plainly a very different take on Zaphod for the film. More power to him. Bill Nighy was fine, but I miss Richard Vernon's Slartibartfast. The film's visual effects were brilliant, especially the destruction of the Earth and the Magrathean shop floor. Credit too for the truly dingy look of the Vogon constructor ship. Questions: Why does the Guide's animation look so awful in the film? And what was with the Humma Kavula sub-plot? It seemed to go nowhere, almost as if the character were to be reintroduced in a sequel. Less John Malkovich, more one-line comedy from the book, I say. Garth Jennings directed this film without apparently any feel for the comedy of the source material. The lines were delivered too quickly, punchlines were lost. There were just two times I laughed out loud during the film. One was when Ford and Arthur dropped out of the Vogon ship, rather than being blown out. The other was Arthur saving Ford from being run down - and only then because the car Ford was trying to greet was a Ford Prefect. That would have gone right over the heads of most cinema-goers, I'm sure. Of the other new material for the film, the point-of-view gun was a cute idea, but lacking the deadly, mind-warping scope of the total perspective vortex, which seems like a similar idea on a larger scale. I hate that this review sounds like a whinge from someone set in his ways, but I truly believe comedy has been the biggest victim here. Perhaps someone sympathetic will take charge of this story with a reboot in about five or 10 years' time. I have my fingers crossed.
Tkbn3812 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a film that compliments the book series very well. The cast is well chosen, the story is brilliant, and it's a funny film that really brings out the best of Douglas Adams' famous series. For the most part, if you've read the first book you'll be up to speed, though it's worth reading the rest. The film features Arthur Dent, whose home is demolished one terrible morning, to make way for a road bypass. Only minutes later is planet Earth destroyed, to make way for a galactic bypass. And so begins a long story of whacky space adventures that take its characters on a journey literally out of this world. There are four main characters that are the premise for this film. Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell) an egotistic two-headed President of the Galaxy, is on a quest to find the Ultimate Question. Ford Prefect (Mos Def), named after a car he almost got ran over by, is a friendly alien from a planet in the vicinity of Beetleguese. Tricia McMillan (Zooey Deschanel) is the love interest of the movie, a notable difference to the book that I will mention later. And of course, we cannot forget Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), an ordinary man from England who has been thrust into the perils of his Galaxy. While Marvin (Warwick Davis), the chronically depressed robot, is quite a major character, he doesn't see that much screen time. The film paces itself really well, and I think the first scene prior to the destruction of Earth is very well made, setting the film up for a thrilling adventure. Interjections from none other than master narrator Stephen Fry help jog the story along, by adding little anecdotes of information from the novels. The cast is fairly well chosen, especially in Martin Freeman, who portrays the often-frustrated but overall-caring character of Arthur Dent so brilliantly. There doesn't seem to have been any purpose in Questular Rontok (Anna Chancellor), but each actor is almost a direct match to the characters in the novels. That is, except Trillian.Trillian is overall a fairly minor character in the novels, however it was interestingly chosen to push her more into the limelight, giving her a presence in a love triangle between Arthur and Zaphod. It was clever to do this, but fans of the series may be disappointed to see a whole new story arc introduced purely for the purposes of romance (although I wasn't). The story of the Vogans in the series feels wholly incomplete, so it seems wise that it was resolved in the movie. On the whole, the film intertwined plots from the novels ingeniously, adding what seems necessary here and there. It seems the ending on Magrathea was a little unusual, but on the whole it completes the movie decently enough. This is a film that, to use Adams' quote, has made a lot of people very angry, and even been regarded as a bad move. Perhaps these people should take into account that many of the differences between the book and movie were written in by Douglas Adams himself, prior to his death. On the whole, it's mostly harmless, and certainly worth a watch. I certainly enjoyed it; it really compliments the novels very well. Arthur Dent, and for that matter all the characters, are brilliantly acted out. The plot is to be commended for the most part, and the introduction of a romance that really supports Arthur as a character is on the whole satisfying.If you've read the series you have to watch the movie. And if you haven't, it's still definitely worth a see.