In cinema, book adaptations are a precarious art form. Translating a purely cerebral medium into a purely audio-visual one brings with it an expansive range of difficulties. While people often complain about “the book being better,” novels and their cinematic counterparts cannot really be judged side by side. If a movie actually does manage to translate the general feeling evoked by a novel onto the screen, it should simply be considered a miracle in its own right and be left at that.
The new film adaptation of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is no miracle. Instead, it is a wildly uneven film, which is at once intelligent and visually creative while also being poorly paced and oddly unimaginative. Based on the classic sci-fi satire by Douglas Adams, the film tells the story of Arthur Dent, a lily-livered Englishman who is taken on an intergalactic journey moments before Earth is destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass.
While comparing the film to the book would be a useless endeavor, watching for the film’s deviations from the original story line can be very telling. In the book, Arthur is taken aboard the vessel The Heart of Gold, joining his friend Ford Prefect, president of the galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox, fellow Earth refugee Trillian and depressed robot Marvin. So far so good. What the film adds is a love story between Arthur and Trillian and a rather perfunctory happy ending; neither addition is terribly inspired nor helpful.
The dark wit and cynicism of Adams’ book remains scattered throughout as do the majority of his most creative ideas. But everything is glossed over with the bright sheen of special effects and Hollywood clichï