If Jorge Luis Borges had written an episode of the cult British TV sci-fi series Blake’s 7, the script might resemble Douglas Adams’s 1970s radio masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which became a less good, but still decent TV serial and also a globally bestselling novel.
Adams’s inspired absorption of influences — Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Monty Python, Lewis Carroll — would not have been possible without the strength of his own insouciant comic originality; and on his death in 2001 at the unfunnily early age of 49, we lost a playful virtuoso of ideas.
So much of his energy had been expended on trying to get a longed-for movie version off the ground. For years, nothing at all happened and the only sci-fi comedy, incidentally, which had anything like Adams’s spirit was the very funny Galaxy Quest. But here the film version finally is, and the author and co-writer has a melancholy posthumous exec-producer credit as well as a final dedication to “Douglas”.
The film is no disgrace, and honours the Guide’s gentle, low-tech BBC origins. But it doesn’t do justice to the open-ended inventiveness of the original. The Anglo-American accommodations of casting have muddled its identity and the performances of the new American stars can be uneasy. It somehow seems heavier-footed and slower-moving than Adams’s concept; the gravity is stronger.
Arthur Dent is the put-upon English bloke enraged to find that his house is to be demolished to make way for a new bypass, at exactly the same time that Earthlings discover that the same thing is to happen to their insignificant little planet: a giant cluster of alien construction ships is massing just outside the ionosphere ready to reduce it to dust. With magnificent bureaucratic scorn, they announce that the plans have been available for inspection for more than 50 years at Alpha Centauri and it is too late to lodge an official complaint.
Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office) is inspired casting as Dent, and delivers exactly the right note of futile English sarcasm in the face of complete and utter planetary destruction. His best friend, the oddly named Ford Prefect, tips him off about what is about to happen; together they escape and hitch-hike across the Milky Way, armed with their invaluable book, the Hitchhiker’s Guide, voiced with lucid serenity by Stephen Fry.
Prefect is played by Mos Def, and a wisecracking American figure is arguably the right choice to guide our clueless and innocent Brit out of trouble. Zooey Deschanel plays the woman to whom poor Arthur loses his heart, and this casting, too, works reasonably well, though female roles were never particularly strongly conceived in this comedy galaxy.
The problem is with Sam Rockwell playing the bizarre figure of Zaphod Beeblebrox, that arrogant inter-galactic adventurer who has somehow become a kind of itinerant universal president and the figure responsible, with one negligent signature, for the annihilation of Arthur’s home planet.
Rockwell sashays about gamely, but largely uncomprehendingly, sporting a glam-rock costume and unreliable grin, but the character never really connects to anything or anyone else on screen. He’s virtually on autopilot.
There’s a visual difficulty, too, with his two faces. When Mark Wing-Davey played Zaphod on television, he had an extra face floating waxily alongside his real one. Rockwell’s Zaphod has his second face shooting up periodically from under his chin like some sort of Exorcist possession, the hidden id to Zaphod’s ego. It is somewhat odd, and when Mos Def, Rockwell, Deschanel and Freeman are rattling around together in the one scene, they look baffled by each other’s existence.
The real star has to be the Book, here re-styled as a high-tech laptop, with witty onscreen graphics illustrating Fry’s voice. Its presence is a little slimmed down but the film nicely portrays one of the most surreal sequences: imagining the thoughts of a giant sperm whale, suddenly magicked into existence in the sky, and left to drop thousands of feet to the ground. My favourite character is the Babel Fish, which shoved into your ear will translate any language. The film, sadly, misses out the Book’s devastating aside — that the Babel Fish, by making everyone understand each other perfectly, has been responsible for more and bloodier wars than anything else in history.
The flavour of the Adams original, its playfully ruminative feel, has been downgraded in favour of a jolly but less interesting outer-space romp. — Â