Don’t Panic! the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Has You Covered!

Ever had one of those morning when you know things can only get better? Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman, Shaun of the Dead) is having one of those mornings. The bulldozers are outside, about to flatten his house to make way for a bypass. He’s lying in front of one of them when his friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def, The Italian Job), turns up . . . and things suddenly get a whole lot worse for Arthur.

In the space of a few minutes he discovers that Ford is not, as he had been told, from Guildford, but is an alien, and furthermore the earth is about to be destroyed to make way for an intergalactic bypass.

Pausing only to snatch up a towel (“A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly, it has great practical value, but more importantly, a towel has immense psychological value” (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Ford whisks Arthur aboard the nearest Vogon spacecraft, seconds before Earth is disintegrated.

And that’s where things start to get really bad.

To avoid ruining your enjoyment by revealing the plot, I’ll merely mention that it includes an improbability drive, two heads, and an abysmally depressed robot named Marvin. And, of course, a love interest (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of love: “Mostly painful.”)

For the die-hard Hitchhiker’s fan, this movie inevitably invites comparison with its predecessors: the novel(s), the original BBC TV series, the Hitch Hiker Radio Show, even the Infocom adventure. Better or worse? Yes and no. I’d say it’s different. Definitely different. But a worthy member of the family.

An aside: Ford Prefect (though we’re not told this in the movie) chose his name when he came to Earth because he thought it would be “nicely inconspicious.” This nice little joke is lost on many, who do not know that the Ford Prefect was a car produced in England from 1949-1953. Which is, coincidentally, the year after the birth of Douglas Adams, originator of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, and described by the BBC as a “writer, computer evangelist, guitarist, amateur naturalist and advocate of balance between science and the arts.”

Too bad that he died four years before this movie version came out. I think he would have liked it.