Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

a phrase i honestly never thought i’d have the opportunity to utter in my lifetime:

“one ticket for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, please”

what follows is my review of the movie, made from the book based on the radio plays which were later made into a TV series. you’ve heard about it by now, or else you’ve been dead. in which case, my condolences.

sorry. from this point in, i’ll try not to be funny. everyone tries to be funny, to match the wit of the late Douglas Adams, when reviewing or even discussing his work. it’s as if, when discussing Shakespeare, one must adopt olde English spellyng. i find myself falling into the same trap, though, but i’m trying hard to be as unfunny and non-Adamsesque as i can muster.

because, frankly, the movie did the same.

so, my one-word review of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the movie:
meh.

that’s right, “meh.”

i really really wanted to love this movie when i heard it was finally being put into production. then i read the early reviews, this one with special interest, and i started really really wanting to hate it.

but, after seeing the movie, all i can say, equivocally and definitively is that it was a movie.

in many places, however too few, it was brilliant. in many places, unfortunately many, it was flawed. there were times when i laughed, even though i knew all the lines before they were spoken. there were times i didn’t laugh, though i should have, again because i knew the lines that weren’t spoken.

the film looked magnificent – the henson creature shop earned its keep with Marvin and the vogons, and i can see now what they’ve been up to since Farscape went off the air. in particular, the entire sequence with Slartibartfast almost, but not quite, made up for the loss of many of the earlier sequences from the book and radio series.

this review is getting longer than the one word i promised in the title, but i’ll sum up here:

i was disappointed in the movie version of a book which i loved. it’s an unavoidable fate for any such film, regardless of the book, the author, or the genre to which it belongs. my sentiments in that regard are, i’m certain, shared by many of the book’s fans.

i was, however, not as disappointed as i had hoped.