The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Dude, Where’s My Spaceship?
Did you want to see goofy slapstick? Come on down! We’ve got faces being slapped and spaceships landing on crabs! Would you like a side of people making goofy faces? Maybe this would have entertained me when I was a toddler, but not now.
Did you want the trite, formulaic Hollywood romance? Well, you got it! Arthur and the girl he blew it with are a lock from the start. Did you want phony looking CG effects? Hang on, because we’ve got a ton of them! Did you want a pointless feel-good ending? Well, you have that one, too! Would you like to see yet another rapper in place of an actual actor? Here’s Mos Def! (Buy his new album!)
That’s not to say the film is all tepid. There are a few good bits directly lifted from the books or radio show, and there are even a few original bits that are funny.
Marvin’s costume is nice, if more than a little reminiscent of the iMac, and they even have a great cameo by the original Marvin from the BBC’s version of Hitchhiker’s Guide. Furthermore, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop does their usual stellar job on the aliens.
Unfortunately, despite the good things here, there are more serious problems than Hollywood clich�©s. The script is always in danger of falling apart, and there are some badly miscast characters.
Mos Def as alien friend Ford Prefect is obviously the easiest target: he seems completely lost and his character never comes together whatsoever. It appears he’s meant to be a major player in the first 15 minutes or so of the movie, but he rapidly becomes a guy who just follows everyone around.
He has zero character development, and the only time he does anything other than stand around is when he has an encounter with an irate ogre/ex-girlfriend. Why is he in this film? Just to get Arthur off the planet?
He accomplishes absolutely nothing otherwise. Furthermore, why have dialogue about him pretending to be from a place in England when his accent is about as American as possible? He doesn’t even offer us an Angelina Jolie-style fake British accent.
The next target is the patently unfunny Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox, egotistical president of the galaxy. I highly doubt the character description said, “drunken frat boy”, but that’s exactly what Rockwell brings to the role.
Due to an apparently pointless side plot, Zaphod is promptly lobotomized and the rest of the movie is Rockwell falling on himself and gazing stupidly at things. Admittedly he has some poor lines to work with, but he delivers them with all the finesse of an angry elephant. He desperately wants to cram the point that he’s stupid and useless down your throat.
Rounding out our trio is the completely generic Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, adventure-seeking scientist. Any woman in Hollywood could have played the role, as she brings absolutely nothing original to the part. Instantly forgettable. She accomplishes nothing more than being someone for Arthur to predictably win over and getting off a very sexist one-liner that manages to offend male and female alike.
John Malkovich does, well, not much of anything as Zaphod’s one time rival for the galactic presidency Humma Kavula, in a completely pointless sequence expanded excruciatingly from a throw away joke in the books.
Why is his character here? What’s the point? They were going to the planet he sent them to anyway. They don’t even return him the item they were sent to fetch. Why? Just to provide a convenient plot device to defeat the Vogons with?
Well, at least the cast isn’t entirely awful. Martin Freeman is well cast as Arthur, the put upon Englishman who wants nothing more to return to his little home in the English countryside and have a cup of tea.
Alan Rickman also nails depressed robot Marvin perfectly, but it has to be said that it’s not that hard to play “crushingly depressed”. Warwick “Wicket The Ewok” Davis is adequate as the guy in Marvin’s suit.
You can’t completely blame the actors, though. Part of the director’s job is to tell them what to do. Either rookie filmmaker Garth Jennings didn’t know how to control them, or actually spurned them on to greater and greater heights of unsubtle overacting, or in the case of Mos Def, non-acting.
One could argue that overacting works great in comedies, but that’s only true of slapstick comedies like Ace Ventura, not ones focused on existentialist humor and playful language.
The cast and director aren’t the only problems. As should be clear by now, the screenplay has some serious issues. First of all, the pacing is all off. Some parts drag on far too long (like the whole Humma sequence), and some fly by so quickly you have a hard time figuring out what they were supposed to be about. The plotting is haphazard and all over the place.
As previously mentioned, the entire subplot about bringing the Point of View gun to Humma is never resolved at all, the love story shudders to its totally obvious conclusion without developing in the least, and Arthur’s character development is nonsensical and tacked on.
The script waffles on whether Arthur is meant to be adventurous or not. If it takes him the whole movie to decide that a life of adventure is the right life for him, then why does he risk trying to rescue Trillian from the Vogons? If he has already overcome his timidness, why is it a big deal that he’s decided to leave Earth at the end?
The script also has some glaring logic errors. Why would Slartibartfast and the people who built Earth just let them have the back up Earth if the mice were the ones paying for it and Arthur just killed the mice? And how could he kill them if they were just the extrusions of extradimensional aliens?
Couldn’t they just extrude again? If they’re meant to be the prophets who were asking Deep Thought about the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything, they’ve clearly “died” before.
And maybe they already paid for the Earth, but the planet is still trapped in the factory and if they put it back where it was before, won’t the Vogons just blow it up again? I mean, it’s still going to be in the route of their hyperspace bypass. And speaking of the Vogons, how did they get down to planet Magrathea? Were they able to get by the planet’s thermonuclear defense system? They didn’t have Slartibartfast’s magic cherry picker to take them through the gate to the factory or to the Earth. Did they fly their spaceship there? If so, where was it? And who was the woman with the Vogons the whole time? She seemed concerned about Zaphod — was she meant to be an assistant or a wife or what? She is never explained at all.
And while I’m at it, how did Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian get to Arthur’s house? Why did their portal go there? What was the point? Just to setup the stupid brain drilling scene? You need a better reason than that! And wanting to get on talk shows and get rich a pretty thin reason to spend millions of years trying to find out great philosophical truths.
And another logic problem: Slartibartfast says designer planets are an expensive luxury. Wouldn’t the mice already need to be rich to afford the planet? Doesn’t that mean they already had what they wanted? After all, millions of people turned out when they asked Deep Thought their question and got their reply.
Considering that the movie starts out well and knowing that Douglas Adams died during the long struggle to get this film off the ground, it’s pretty obvious where screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick steps in.
Every lame, obvious joke is probably his. Every completely superfluous, poorly conceived scene is probably his. But I guess we shouldn’t be expecting much from him. He penned The Rescuers Down Under, the embarrassing sequel to the forgotten 80’s cartoon. He also wrote James and the Giant Peach, Henry Selick’s limp follow-up to The Nightmare Before Christmas. And finally, he wrote Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, one of several doddering sequels to the not very good to begin with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. And you can rest easy knowing that he has written probably awful remakes of the classics Charlotte’s Web and Curious George, due in 2006. Consider another career, Kirkpatrick. Even if the fault were entirely Adams’ (which I doubt), the screenplay is still a mess.
What is going on with this movie? If you stop to think about it at all, it just falls apart. I recognize that this is intended to be a comedy and that comedies do not need to be inherently logical, but this film is not even consistent.
There are also several jokes completely botched by poor delivery (as when Mos Def mumbles them almost inaudibly) and for a film obsessed with having everyone run around and changing locations rapidly, it still manages to drag on.
This movie is similar in spirit and wit to Dude, Where’s My Car?, a true disservice to Douglas Adams’ clever sarcasm and utterly British sense of humor. They have done a great job of siphoning all of the quirkiness and intelligence that made Hitchhiker’s Guide worthwhile to begin with. The way almost every trace of its British origin is stamped out is nothing less than insulting. This film is to British humor and sci-fi what Kung Pow is to Hong Kong’s kung fu movies. It does its best to ridicule its source for not being American while simultaneously misrepresenting its finer points.
I don’t even care that it veers off course of the books. After all, they had their share of differences with Adams’ original radio plays, and there are also the comics, the computer game, and even the stage play to consider. The problem here is not really one of poor adaptation, it’s just that the movie is not very well made.
Maybe the problem is just the shaky script and questionable acting. Maybe the problem is the film’s troubled production, as the giant list of producers suggests. Maybe the problem is that Jennings just couldn’t pull it together. Maybe the problem is that Disney kept meddling and forced difficult changes on them. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that while it’s not utterly terrible, it’s definitely mediocre.
With any luck, this will be as forgotten as Galaxy Quest and Lost in Space. If we are unfortunate enough that this film should make enough money to have the sequels it is so guilelessly begging for, I desperately hope the film finds its way into more British hands.
For crying out loud, they didn’t even bother to explain why a towel is so important.
