I already posted this in the CoasterSims.com Off-Topic Pavilion, but I thought I'd throw it on here too, as it seems to be the type of thing people would blog.
(Did I just use "blog" as a verb!? DAMN!)
Anyway... Here's my review of the long-anticipated movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
As most of you can tell, my member name kind of explains how big of a fan I am... hehehe
I must say, I enjoyed the movie. It was good, but there were a few main things (main in my eyes anyway, and I'm sure everyone has a different view on what is "main" in this series of books, as it has so much to offer) that kept the movie from being great.
I felt they cut out parts of jokes, or pretty much all of a joke in some cases, that they would have easily been able to leave in. keeping more of the original comedy in the film would not have hurt it, and I actually think the pacing would have benefited from the movie being longer due to them leaving more stuff in. a few examples of this were the last bit of the Babelfish explanation, the second half of the Infinite Improbability Drive bit (the friend I saw it with, someone who has never even heard of the series (how could I ever be friends with him!?), didn't quite get the whole concept behind the ship because they left out that second part), and some minor gags like the Sirius Cybernetics Corp or the Vogon guard convo or even the towel explanation. The movie could have been 2 hours and still kept a good, if not better/more suitable, pace.
One thing that I really liked was the way that it felt like a movie, and not like a cheap attempt to make a book into one. The books were very episodic because the whole thing began as a radio play, so to turn that into something feature-length that you watch all in one sitting is quite an accomplishment. I also liked (most of) the altered plotline, which was part of the whole movie-adaptation success.
Like in most cases, the movie isn't as good as the book, but there's a good movie to be enjoyed in this adaptation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. British wit, American... well I guess you can call it wit, some superb visualizations of the book's settings, and good casting choices all combined with a well-adapted screenplay (it helps when the guy who wrote the original series does most of the groundwork before he has a heart-attack at 49) make this a movie worth seeing in my books. Go see it even if you've never read the books, and just laugh like you would at an inside joke you don't get but others around you do when something comes up about towels or resistance being useless.
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