A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

Garth Jennings’ quirky sci-fi space parody “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” begins with a mass exodus of dolphins vacating planet Earth because Earth, they’ve learned, is doomed.

With a quick flick of their tails, they soar into the moonlit heavens, thanking all of us for the free fish before disappearing into outer space.

Cut to Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), a likable loser fighting to save his house from certain demolition because of the highway bypass about to cut through it.

Dumbstruck, Arthur stands outside his home in his ratty bathrobe, incapable of stopping the pending doom because, really, he doesn’t have the moxy to jump in front of a charging bulldozer.

Enter his best friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def), who confirms that Earth will indeed be blown to bits by the Vogons, a grotesque alien race who look like Della Reese crossed with Jabba the Hutt, Angelina Jolie and a prehistoric fish. How does Ford know this? Because he himself is an alien, something Arthur didn’t know, not that he has time to process that information now.

With the press of a button, the Vogons obliterate Earth, but not before Arthur and Ford have hitched a ride aboard their ship. And that, as you can imagine, causes its share of problems, particularly after they connect with Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), a young wanderlust Arthur favors; Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), the high-strung, two-headed galaxy president currently dating Trillian; and Marvin (voice of Alan Rickman), a woefully depressed robot whose biting asides steal the show.

As written by Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick from Adams’ popular book and BBC radio play, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is an uneven movie with limited appeal that exists on the fringes. It won’t enjoy the cult status of the book, but that won’t surprise fans of the book. Adams’ tale was always better suited for the page and for the imagination than for film--a literal environment in which whimsy and satire, when not done correctly, can struggle to connect onscreen.

What’s missing here is a sense of purpose that balanced the book’s anarchistic lunacy, an irreverent wit that doesn’t feel as if has to sell itself on center stage. The book was free to be what it was, but the movie, while encouraged to do the same, seems compromised by the medium. You can feel it staining to capture that freedom.

And yet all isn’t lost here. Individual scenes can be riotous, the film’s originality is a lark considering we’re now in a movie season that favors safety over originality, and the acting is strong. John Malkovich is nicely creepy as a legless religious guru with an ugly agenda and Bill Nighy, that great character actor of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Love, Actually” is just right as Slartibartfast, a bemused alien whose perceptive comments about the meaning of life and the universe help to pull together the end of this “Galaxy” with unexpected finesse.

Grade: B-