I’ve just finished watching the film version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on Sky movies. Here’s my short, one word review…

Tragic

O.K., here’s my longer review…

This version is a Nutrimat machine rendition of the classic.. i.e. it’s almost but not quite entirely unlike the original. I’m not going to say much about the changes in the story (other than they are ill thought out and in a lot of ways just a vehicle to get John Malkovic in the film) but the whole thing was a mess.

The jokes, when left intect were spoken without comic timing. Where there should have been suspense there was deadpan. Jokes were either truncated so that they lost their punchline or were so cut that they didn’t make any seanse at all, and hence were unfunny. Oh, and they used an irony extraction tool.. except on the producers.

A case in point for all of the above can be seen during the end credits. There is shown the “guide” rendition of the Valhurg and Gurgugvant battle fleet joke. There were no time constraints here as the credits were rolling and would do so for another few minutes. Yet, the whole sequence was butchered, removing all the parts about the battle fleets destroying whole planets etc. which made it sound as if the fleets were mighty, fearsome and dangerous.. i.e. building the whole point of the gag, so that when they were eaten by the small dog you thought “so what?” The punchline of the dog eating the “dangerous, hellish fleet” was lost. This was a microcosom of the whole film.

Oh, and did anyone else think that the 1960s retro comic animations for the book just felt stupid? Give me the sophisticated complexity of the originals any day.

I think I’ll go and flush my brain out with soap and water now. It feels dirty.