DON’T PANIC!
When the movie crashes and burns, there’s always the book
It was,
ironically, a Thursday morning. There were less than 36 hours until the long-awaited
adaptation of Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” opened on the
big screen.
I had
been debating with myself for several weeks about whether I should refresh my
memory with a quick read before seeing the movie, or wait until afterward too
compare the book with the film. Since high school, I had read “The Guide” about
once every six months. But life had been seriously busy of late, and almost a
year had passed since I had last joined Arthur, Ford, Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin
in their quest to find the meaning to life, the universe and everything.
“So,
should I read it now or later‘?” I asked myself.
“42!”
Hmmm.
Adams’ enigmatic answer to the ultimate question provided little insight, so I turned
to my bookshelf for further inspiration.
Most of
the books in my apartment are the decade-old hardcovers and paperbacks I inherited
from my mother, but nestled on the second shelf, third space in, should have been
a very well-used, black leather and gold-embossed, 800-pIus page omnibus
edition containing every word of Adams' overgrown trilogy — novels, a short
story, and his own “Guide to The Guide." There was a conspicuous emptiness
on the second shelf.
“Don’t
Panic! It’s probably in the bedroom somewhere,” I told myself. I left the
bedroom 30 minutes later with empty boxes and drawers covering the bed and
books strewn across the floor, but no “Guide."
“Didn’t
you loan it to some,” my wife asked, desperately hoping that the sudden house
wrecking monster her husband had become would stop after one room.
And then
it happened. From some distant darkness, a memory gurgled. Like small bubbles
of gas oozing up from the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta, it broke on the
surface of my consciousness, leaving me feeling ominously ill.
(Pop)
“This...” (pop pop pop) “is my favorite..." (pop) “book!” (Pop) “Don’t”
(POP POP) “LOSE IT!”
That was
it; no name, no face, just eight fateful words.
I called
my brother and my sister. I called all my friends. Then I called all my wife's friends.
I even called my mother-in-law.
“Nope,
it wasn’t me.”
“Huh-uh.”
“Sorry!”
“I have
my own copy.”
“I don’t
ever read! Why’d you call me?"
How many
people do I have to gall before I my book? 42?
Hmmm.
This was most unfortunate. I didn’t even have the dog-eared paperbacks I had carried
around since high school, so I finally resigned myself to purchasing a new copy...but
that would have to wait until after I saw the movie.
“Besides, movies are never as good as the book anyway, right?” I told myself. “I’ll probably enjoy the movie much more if I don’t read the books first anyway.”
Thursday
afternoon, one week later. The fact that it was again a Thursday should have been
an obvious warning, but, much like “The bumbling hero, Arthur Dent, I was pretty
clueless. The weather was terrible, thick dark clouds blanketed the sky, and
rain was drowning everything in sight. Was that thunder? Or maybe a fleet
ofVogon demolition ships rumbling just above the clouds, gleefully waiting to destroy
what remaining faith I had in Hollywood’s ability to successfully adapt a
favorite book to film.
I didn’t
want to develop any preconceived notions, so I read only two reviews prior to
seeing the movie. One review was fairly complimentary, although Roger Ebert
only gave the two stars. But hey, he’s given poor reviews to films I liked before,
so don’t panic, right?
The
movie began with what would have been, if I were reading the book, Chapter 23. A
chorus of acrobatic dolphins introduced the audience to Earth’s impending doom
with a fully orchestrated, Broadway-style musical number, “So Long and Thanks
for All the Fish."
“That
wasn’t so bad,” I thought to myself, “a little unusual maybe, but not entirely un-MontyPythonesque."
Visually,
the film was quite successful. The Vogons were green and ugly, Zaphod’s second
head was imaginatively designed, and the animated renditions of entries from
“The Guide" were fantastically kitschy. Sadly, little else was bearable
during the rest of the nearly two-hour-long film.
The
movie is Garth Jennings’ debut as a director and it shows. The pacing was horrible,
and the acting was generally uninspired. I had seen bad “Saturday Night Live”
skits that were better than this.
Adams received
credit for the screenplay along with writer Karey Kirkpatrick. However, the
resulting script is a jumble of poorly executed moments from the original novel,
a few excerpts from the other novels, and an extremely dull additional story
line allegedly created by Adams especially for movie. Many of the most
memorable elements of the books seem to have been discarded in favor of mind-numbing
one-liners.
If you
had never read the books, the significance of many elements will probably be
lost. Take towels, for instance. According to “The Guide," a towel is “the
most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Yet in the movie,
while Ford is seen carrying a towel through must of the film—even sometimes waving
it frantically in an effort to ward off a horde of Vogon soldiers, the reason
for this seemingly bizarre behavior is never explained.
By the
end of the film, I found myself wishing that, due to a terrible miscalculation
of scale, the whole production had been swallowed by small dog prior to
release. I would rather have endured two hours of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz’s horrible
poetry rather than this abysmal rendering of Adams’ classic tale.
I walked
out of the theater thinking of the last line from “So Long and Thanks for All
the Fish,” the fourth novel in the series. Adams wrote, “There was a point to
this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler`s mind.” It seemed
unfortunately appropriate in this circumstance.
“But
don’t panic,” I said to myself, “Borders is just down the road. There`s nothing
like the book!”
