accessAtlanta

'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy': Better on the page than the screen

Whether one thumbs a ride with the film version of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" will depend very much on whether you know cult favorite Douglas Adams' work.

Not having read his book on which the movie is based, I couldn't quite get into this undeniably original but frenetic mess. Amid all the wild oddities, something vital gets lost: heart.

Touchstone Pictures 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' C+ Director: Garth Jennings Starring: Bill Bailey, Anna Chancellor, Warwick Davis, Martin Freeman, John Malkovich Run time: 110 minutes Release date: April 29, 2005 Rating: PG for thematic elements, action and mild language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Trying to explain the plot to the uninitiated would take up way too much space, so I'll strip it down to the basics: a massive fleet of spaceships destroys the Earth, whisking our heroes on a wild ride in which nothing is as it seems.

The movie begins promisingly, with a delightfully droll prologue that explains how dolphins, who are smarter than humans, had been signaling us for years that the end was near, but we mistook their warnings for cute acrobatic tricks in water parks. The dolphins leap out of the oceans to a hilarious little tune called "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish."

Then things get really weird.

Even though I laughed at many of the jokes and admired the very British quirkiness of the story, it's a major problem when every single one of the humanoid characters, save two, are either dull as dust or annoying as nails on a blackboard. That made it a little difficult to care about the story in the end.

I very much liked Trillian, the slightly daffy heroine played by Zooey Deschanel, an actress I have long admired for her offhand, easygoing charm in movies like "Almost Famous" and "Elf." Bill Nighy, the scene-stealing singer in "Love Actually" is a hoot as an engineer named Slartibartfast with a nifty little motto: "I'd rather be happy than be right any day." My favorite non-humanoid was Marvin the Paranoid Android, voiced with riotous, droning gloom as only Alan Rickman can.

However, the everyman hero Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) is so ordinary he's boring, and Mos Def barely registers as the alien who saves him from Earth's demise. On the other hand, Sam Rockwell registers a bit too much as the swaggering president Zaphrod Beeblebrox, a little of whom goes a very long way.

The movie lingered in development limbo for so long that Adams retains a screenplay credit, even though he died in 2001. Perhaps it would have been better if the movie were developed for a little while longer to prune it of all the extraneous zaniness so that the characters could shine through. Director Garth Jennings and co-writer Karey Kirkpatrick seem so enamored of Adams' style that they couldn't bear to cut anything.

Not everyone is so enamored of Adams' work, which is decidedly an acquired taste. Reaction at the preview screening ranged from enthusiastic applause to refrains of "What in the world was that?" And some other refrains weren't even that polite.

As for me, I haven't acquired the taste yet, but I'm curious enough to check out the book. I suspect this story plays much better on the page than it does on screen.