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Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

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Silver screen embraces Adams

A long time ago — thirty years, almost — a multimedia franchise began which has taken the science fiction genre places to which it had never successfully gone before.

Sure, Star Wars put sci-fi front and center on the entertainment map, but soon, in its wake, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was born as a BBC radio series.

Numerous incarnations followed — the hugely popular five-novel “trilogy,” a TV series, an Infocom computer game and even various stage productions. A motion picture was in discussion nearly 25 years ago.

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The film’s protracted gestation is a saga unto itself, one complicated especially by creator Douglas Adams’ unexpected death in 2001. But the screenplay was his creation (co-written by “Chicken Run” writer Karey Kirkpatrick), and changes from previous versions were at his discretion.

The core of the story has always been the saga of Earthman/Everyman Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman of “The Office”), whisked away from the Earth, just before its destruction, by his friend Ford Prefect (rapper/actor Mos Def) — who is not, in fact, from Guildford, but rather from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.

The film sees these two rendezvousing, in all improbability, with the President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”) — an old acquaintance and semi-relative of Ford’s — and Tricia MacMillan, aka Trillian (Zooey Deschanel, “Elf”) who Arthur happens to have met at a party not long before, from which she left with the ego-centric Zaphod. They embark on a search for the meaning of life, the universe and, as has so often been said, everything.

On a more abstract level, it is a story of man’s place in the universe, simultaneously crucial and meaningless. Freeman embodies this adeptly.

The cast works well as an ensemble. Mos Def plays Ford fairly passively, giving room for Deschanel to develop Trillian’s complexities, and for Rockwell to explore Zaphod as a scatterbrained jerk, with definite hints of a George W. Bush parody.

What has made HHGTG such a success across so many formats has been its adaptability. It has been refitted for each medium, which means that, while there is no “definitive” version, there also cannot be a Douglas Adams-penned version that is “untrue.”

Much criticism of the film will come from fans who can recite the books verbatim but have not heard the radio show, or loved the radio show but never watched the TV series. Each version is different and adds to the canon. The movie is not an adaptation as much as an incarnation.

With that in mind, there are moments in which beloved lines from previous versions are abridged for no apparent reason. There is a deliberate attempt to Americanize the story, which means sacrificing much of Adams’ famous verbal humor.

The love story — which was a non-factor in earlier incarnations — is pulled off with sincerity. The improved development of Trillian’s character permits this.

Adams first wrote the radio series as a man in his twenties with a romantic nature but an unsuccessful love life, an aspiring family man without a family. By the time he had finished his final draft for the screenplay, he had married and had a daughter.

He also grew from a struggling writer to a wealthy and highly regarded man of vision. His technophilia and his work as an environmentalist made him a hero of intelligent progress.

The optimistic outlook at which he had arrived in his last years removed some cynicism from the Hitchhiker’s Guide many of us remember, but it gives the film the satisfying denouement that is lacking in almost all earlier work in his canon. The hope is that the film may bring the Guide to new generations, who may go on to explore the wealth of Hitchhiker material Douglas Adams left us.

Grade: A/B

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