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Hitchhikers Redux

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Rory posted an interesting counterpoint to my review.

Rory has some good points - I agree that you can't expect a movie to be totally faithful to a book, and I have noticed that there is a distinct correlation between how well somebody liked the book (and, perhaps, how familiar they were with the book), and how disappointed they were with the movie.

Rory would argue that we are "armchair literary snobs", but I think there's more to it than that.

Certain books, for whatever reason, resonate with certain people. Adams has a peculiar way of twisting reality in a particular way, and much of that depends on his choice of words. It's funny in a very specific way.

Somebody running around with a juicer on his head or holding the arm of a robot may also be funny, but not in the same way.

I'm disappointed with the movie because it didn't capture that particular view of reality (or unreality) that Adams excelled at.

To risk a poor analogy, I went hoping for a Kevin Smith movie or a Jim Carrey movie, and ended up with a Will Ferell movie. It's still funny, but definitely not in the way that I had hoped it would be funny. It's no longer quirky - it's mainstream, as evidenced by the major role that that Arthur-Trillian "romance" played in the movie, and it's total absence in the book. Just another "me too" movie...

Come to think of it, the book to movie analogy isn't really fair in this case. Hitchhiker's first showed up as a radio show, morphed into a book, a BBC TV series (which, for all of its faults, is funnier than the movie).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2005
    FWIW: if the movie had been totally faithful to the book, that would have been against the tradition of the HHGTG.

    The books weren't faithful to the radio series, the TV series weren't faithful to either, and the books have lots of internal inconsistencies within themselves. :)
  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2005
    And in addition to what Robert said, the movie script was apparently mostly from Douglas Adams according to directory Robbie Stamp: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/26/1952248&tid=97&tid=133&tid=214.

    With all the differences between the radio version, book, BBC series, and now the movie I'd say DNA treated this like a work-in-progress.
  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2005
    So there I was, running an in house created code generator against a rather large database to create a DAL based around existing stored procedures, some of which had really large parameter lists (created by an outside PLC programmer...long story). Well 25,000 lines of code created in 2 seconds, but intellisense would not work for any instance of this autogenerated DAL class. Turns out the culprits were 8 methods that tried to build around these 76 parameter long procs.

    OK, so how many parameters can I have before intellisense stops working for the entire class? You guessed it: 42.
  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2005
    Hmm My latest project has 42,000 lines of code...

    The love story in the film was probably added by DNA to rival the Fenchurch love affair in the closing books of the 5 part trilogy, I perticually liked the development of that...