Pete's Eats

I took my son to see the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie tonight.

It’s a brave attempt all right, but to be honest it was shite…

The good things? Marvin, The Heart of Gold, the Vogons, Trillian, Slarti. That’s about it really.

The bad things? Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, the Book and well, just about everything else.

Arthur, played by Martin Freeman, was just like a character from the BBC’s ‘The Office’. I was sorely disappointed with this as I really imagined that he would fit right into it. You might say that Arthur’s character is supposed to be a middle-class white collar type of person that you’d find in ‘The Office’ and maybe you’re right but seeing Mr Freeman in that role was a little bit too close for comfort for me.

Zaphod was simply awful. Ford was totally wrong but being such a departure from the original could have really shone. The Book – well, I had seriously high hopes for the Book being narrated by Stephen Fry but in the end, it hardly made an appearance during the whole film. The Book’s graphics were a few hundred £’s worth of basic Flash work albeit prepared by the world famous, multi-award winning Shynola – thereby probably costing a much higher number of £’s instead…

The script that *was* true to the original was missing most of it’s context and very often it’s punchline. Very scrappy.

I could go on, but I think you get the gist of what I think. It’s very hard being such a HHGTTG purist and divorcing my thoughts, knowledge and expectations from the film’s offering but I genuinely feel that even if I could I would be desperately confused as to what it all meant. For the purist it’s just all wrong and for someone who doesn’t know the work previously it’s disjointed and confusing.

It could have been so much better…