Movie Needs a Guide to the Funny

First, a disclaimer: when it comes to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m biased. I have great love for Douglas Adams and all of his books. I recently read his biography, which only reaffirmed my affection for the man’s work. Getting this movie made was one of Adams’s dreams, and so there’s simple pleasure in seeing it come to fruition. In short, I’m probably not seeing the film as clearly as I should. It does, however, feel like a film made for Adams fans, as opposed to the average person.

This movie only received the green light after the success of Men in Black, a movie which Adams charitably described as “familiar”. Despite a keen fan base, the movie industry had, for twenty years, been highly sceptical of sci-fi comedy. There’s a similarity between the two films, with surprising galactic stories and an everyman thrown into improbably circumstances.

The rest of my comments are after the jump. They do feature MINOR SPOILERS, most of which will be familiar to anyone who has read the novel or heard the radio show.

The film is well-made and performed. The casting–mostly unknowns for an American audience–is excellent. The challenges that characters like Zaphod or Marvin offer are met head-on, and it’s a joy to watch the characters interact.

Likewise, the film looks great. Director Garth Jennings has achieved a very natural, lived-in universe using a skillful combination of animatronics, puppets and CG. The Vogons, for example, are fantastic, as is the Heart of Gold spaceship. I was particularly fond of the graphic renderings of entries from the Guide, which were playful and built upon Stephen Fry’s wonderful readings.

Unfortunately (to paraphrase The West Wing), they forgot to bring the funny. The book’s humour (and, to a lesser degree, that of the radio show) lies in its dry wit and inventiveness. Lines and scenes are funny because the ideas they contain are amusing–a door which voices its pleasure at opening and closing, a moping robot or a super-computer that provides a very poor answer to a very big question. In our mind, those are hilarious.

Unfortunately, those same jokes don’t work very well on screen. They fall flat because there’s little left to the imagination. We’re not helped, of course, by the fact that the jokes are so familiar. Adams transformed the number ’42’–it’s as charged as the number ’69’ is. Ultimately, the funniest bits of the movies are Fry’s readings from the Guide, which is pretty telling.

Why was Men in Black funny? Mostly, I think, because of the chemistry between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. That chemistry was lacking among the cast, in part because Hitchhiker’s Guide was a little too pacey for its own good. I’ve written before about films that know when to slow down–this one didn’t.

Am I disappointed? A little. Still, it’s an above-average movie, and a story that deserves to be told. I’m generally not in favour of remakes, but I wouldn’t mind if somebody took another swing at this one in twenty years. It may have been Adams’ proximity to the project that prevented it from reaching its full potential.

Here’s what a bunch of other writers thought.