Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Wednesday August 10th 2005 at 18:30 I sat down to watch the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time, as free of dread and/or unreasonable expectations as a fan of the books can possibly be.
I'm quite sure the film stands up well to repeated viewings, a trait it shares with the books.
Admit it, it's not as if the books made all that much sense to you the first time you read them either.
If nothing else there's a lot of details to appreciate. I really liked the whole visual style of the film, and I think it's a much better visual adaptation (in all aspects, not just because special effects have evolved) of the material than the old TV series. They, including Douglas, I guess, dared change things around to make it more visual. Perhaps that's how they motivated changing a lot of great dialogue too. That's one place where I agree with a lot of people who dislike the film: I can't for the life of me figure out how they justified changing a lot of perfect dialogue from the books into something that's only a few words different, yet a lot less funny. I understand keeping the Guide entries down (the remaining ones are really nicely visualised as well) and other changes made to be more like a film and less like speech to moving images, but the dialogue mangling is just inexplicable. I'd love to hear from someone involved about the process behind this. It doesn't ruin the film, it's just weird to sit and wonder why they didn't pick the original phrasing when that one's so close and so much better.
But back to positive things. I like the cast and the way the characters are depicted. Yes, all of them. Marvin looks nice, Slartibartfast is great (I think even the meanest critics are with me on that one), Ford and (even more so) Trillian grew on me, the Vogons rock, Eddie sounds perfect, Arthur is okay and Zaphod ...
...
he's just perfect too! (Hah! Bet you expected another chainsawing of him!) I always had to consciously add in the image of a second head whenever I thought of him, and it wasn't as if there was a real point of the two heads anyway. This rendition is much more to my liking. Energetic, spontaneous, careless and weirdly dressed. Everything you look for in the president of the galaxy.
Some day, a Peter Jackson to Douglas Adams' Tolkien might come along. That day will be glorious indeed. Until then, I say this holds up as a noble and entertaining effort. I still feel it could have been better, both in obvious and more fuzzy ways, but it's not rubbish and I certainly couldn't have done a better job myself. I want to see it again, and that can't be a bad thing.
2005-08-14
I wonder if the problem is that, after Douglas passed away leaving the partly finished script behind, people didn't dare change things enough? People seem to mention everywhere that if there was one thing Douglas didn't do it was to write things in one go and then see them as set in stone. They mentioned how he'd rework and polish sentences, words and thoughts until they were perfect. Yet the guy who finsihed the script after Adams' passing insists he didn't really write much at all, but rather just organize and put things together. Could that be the core of the problem right there? If someone who's notorious for re-writing and missing deadlines passes you something before it is finished it certainly can't be the grandest of ideas to just shake it a bit to bring things into a bit more order and then push it straight into production. And anyone who's ever read anything about any kind of development knows that the last 10%, the ones that really makes everything shine, take 90% of the effort. So, if this film is indeed as straight from Douglas' script as possible, the reason it seems a little rough is that nobody dared to polish it.
Strange. I have just said that if I found something Douglas had written and wanted to put it out as a finished story, the best thing to do would be for me to sit down and change and add to his writings.
No wonder if they had a problem grasping that thought ...