Editor’s Note: With a relative lack of new film releases due to the coronavirus pandemic, Vanyaland is taking a look back at some notable films on the anniversary of their release. For the full archive of this series, click here.
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If you were an anglophile of a certain age — too young for Britpop, too old for Sherlock — you probably hold the mid-’00s with a reasonable amount of nostalgic regard now, with the year 2005 perhaps holding outsized importance for you. That was the year of Demon Days, Live 8, Daniel Craig being announced as being the new James Bond (which caused some truly bizarre reactions among fans, some of which still persist to this day), and, most importantly, the return of Doctor Who to television after a lengthy hiatus. It kicked off a new era of British TV, at least for those across the pond, and it still holds a substantial portion of nerd interest, especially on these shores. But another Who-related event hit screens on April 28, when Garth Jennings’ long-awaited film adaptation of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was finally released. But, weirdly enough, despite courting a similar audience, it only was a minor success — making $100 million on a $50 million budget — and most seem to have forgotten that it even exists.
Originally a radio comedy, Adams — who also wrote for Doctor Who during the Tom Baker days and eventually repurposed some of his unused material from the show for bits and pieces in later installments of the series — was encouraged to transform his popular show into book form, which I’d wager most would agree is its ideal form (the TV show that hit right about the same time has numerous fans, but is just a little bit less beloved than the actual texts themselves). The first book hit shelves in 1979, and Adams would continue working on “the trilogy” ( which would ultimately span five books) all the way through 1992. The whole series is good, but the first installment is particularly close to many hearts — Adams’ wit is at its sharpest there, and its breezy, brisk pace compliments the rapid-fire succession of gags. It’s also where most of the truly iconic moments in the series appear — 42, towels, “Don’t Panic,” etc. — and it has the best hook of them all as well.
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One morning, a mild-mannered and average Englishman named Arthur Dent (played by Martin Freeman in Jennings’ film) wakes up to find out that a construction crew is about to demolish his house to make way for a bypass. Dent protests that the city never gave him enough notice and the foreman responds to him that “the plans have been on display” for months and that he had ample time to file a complaint. But Arthur — and, indeed, the whole human race — has a whole lot more to worry about than their immediate problems and only Arthur’s best friend, Ford Prefect (a miscast Mos Def), knows what trouble is coming. Ford extradites Arthur away from his predicament and takes him to the local pub, where he informs Arthur that he’s A) actually an alien (who initially assumed that cars were the dominate lifeform on Earth) and B) that the Earth is minutes away from destruction at the hands of an ugly, bureaucratic race of aliens known as the Vogons, who, in addition to composing the third worst poetry in the universe, have been tasked by the galactic government to demolish the planet in order to put in an *interstellar* bypass.
It made sense that that particular installment would be the one that so many tried over the years to bring to the screen. at one point, Ivan Reitman was set to produce, and Dan Aykroyd was approached about being in the film, alongside Bill Murray, but a little film called Ghostbusters came along and derailed that plan — but things really heated up when Jay Roach came on as a producer in the early Aughts. Roach wanted Spike Jonze to direct it (holy shit could you even imagine what that would have been like), and for the likes of Hugh Laurie, Jim Carrey to star. Adams was tasked with writing the screenplay, and pre-production began to heat up. But, sadly, the author passed away in May 2001, and production stalled out. Karey Kirkpatrick, the screenwriter of Chicken Run, was brought on by Roach in order to polish Adams’ final draft, and, by 2004, they were ready to start production. At the recommendation of Spike Jonze, director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith — known as the English filmmaking duo Hammer and Tongs, and famed for their work in music videos — were hired. It would be their first feature film, and it would be a huge undertaking.
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Arthur’s skeptical about his friend’s revelations, but he doesn’t have enough time to doubt them: Within minutes, our protagonist finds himself onboard a Vogon ship, Ford having hitched them a ride as the Vogon fleet descended into the atmosphere, and the Earth finds itself incinerated by something other than the folly of man or an unavoidable meteor. The stowaways are soon discovered by the alien creatures and, after being tortured by an impromptu Vogon poetry jam, are tossed out in the vacuum of space. In an extremely unlikely turn of events, they’re rescued by the crew of the ship Heart of Gold, which is powered by an improbability drive — the higher the improbability, the faster you get to your destination. This is rendered lovingly by Jennings, and is a source of a lot of humor and wonder — at one point, the drive causes the cast to become yarn figures (I still have my yarn plushie of Marvin sitting near my desk) — and the various forms the drive takes before it blinks out of existence are often quite funny and whimsical.
Aboard this seemingly-magical spaceship, the pair find themselves having an audience with the Galactic President, Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell). Beeblebrox, alongside his human companion, Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) whom Arthur once tried to pick up at a party on Earth and failed, and Marvin (Alan Rickman and Warwick Davis), the depressed android, stole the experimental ship in order to hunt down the location of the planet Magrethea. There, millennia ago, a huge supercomputer named Deep Thought (Helen Mirren) was created in order to provide the answer to the question of “life, the universe, and everything.” The only issue is that nobody seems to know what the answer, after all of these years, and Beeblebrox — a two-headed, three-armed buffoon — wants to be the man who finds out and reaps all of the rewards that would inevitably follow.
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Up until this point, Jennings’ film is watchable — even pretty good — and those who have fond memories of it are likely to assume that their recollections are spot-on, and those who disliked it are liable to think that they might have missed out on something special. That ranges from the fantastic introduction to the film, where Stephen Fry’s narration (he’s both the voice of the Guide and its narrator, don’t ask) explains that humans were only the third most-intelligent creatures on the planet Earth, over a montage of home-video footage of the second-most — dolphins — taken at Seaworld. Fry’s narration gives way to a lovely, goofy musical number, in which the dolphins’ last transmission to the human race before Earth’s destruction — “So long, and thanks for all the fish” — is turned into a lovely old-fashioned show tune. When the film shifts past its prologue, the humor flags a bit. It suffers from a condition endemic to mid-aughts comedy, when loud frantic “randomness” and disorganized slapstick took the place of well-constructed gags, as if everyone had learned the wrong lessons from Jerry Lewis and set about making truly purposeless anarchy. When written out and given the space to breathe, like in Fry’s commentary and a few particular scenes, such as the famous “falling whale” bit, you can see glimpses of a better, calmer film.
It’s not all without merit, though: Hitchhiker’s Guide really comes alive visually when the Vogons show up, and when Jennings starts to come out of his shell. The aliens look like giant lima beans on a good day and a particularly craggy giant booger on another, and they’re realized practically, with lovely puppetry and effects work bringing them to life. Marvin’s design is equally iconic, and it’s still my preferred take on the character, with Rickman’s voice pairing perfectly with what’s presented to us on screen. You can feel Terry Gilliam’s influence on Jennings here, and it wouldn’t be wrong to play this one alongside Time Bandits in a double feature — the early scenes at Arthur’s household feel as if they’re taking place in the same neighborhood as Kevin’s in that film. That extends to things like the Babel Fish — the in-ear symbiotic creature that feeds on brainwaves and excretes language translated in the host’s native tongue — which looks like a claymation cross between a rubber duck and a seahorse. The guide itself is also amusingly realized, even if it looks a bit dated by our present standards in a post-smartphone world, and its entries are handsomely animated and narrated with good humor by Fry. And, in an era where CGI was becoming the de-facto choice for all effects and post-production needs, it’s used smartly here, and really holds up some fifteen years later.
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But it’s around the time of the Deep Thought flashback (in which you see the lovely design of the supercomputer, head hunched in its arms like a bored teenager) that Jennings’ film starts to lose its way. Hitchhiker’s Guide‘s true handicap is that, for all intents and purposes, it is exclusively for those with a line-by-line familiarity with Adams’ work. This is inherently an issue with any adaptation penned in part by the author of the original text, and doubly so if that text is beloved by legions of nerds all around the world, who have spent hours and hours pouring over every single line of the work like it’s the New Testament or an IKEA instruction guide — it’s nearly impossible to imagine what this experience would have been like for those completely unfamiliar with it. Hell, it’s triply so if said author passed away before being able to see the big-screen adaptation hit theaters, and one of the last major documents that they produced was the screenplay for the film. Whether it was out of reverence or deference, there are a number of rough choices here that could have been ironed out with an additional edit, without having to wipe out Adams’ “pet sounds.” But any revision would have been a tough ask, given just how much was tossed out in order to make space for what we see onscreen — an hour of content at the very least, if you’re going by the radio series’ equivalent length, or much, much more if you’re using the book as a point of reference.
Yet, Adams’ own changes aren’t too great, with them perhaps being a concession to studio dreams for a franchise. For instance, why is John Malkovich’s religious megalomaniac and antagonist Humma Kavula, an Adams-penned addition to the story, even in the movie in the first place (aside from the added name-brand recognition that an actor of Malkovich’s caliber brings to the film)? Kavula’s the leader of a religion founded by a group of aliens named Jatravartids, who worship a being who sneezed the universe into existence, and he tasks Zaphod with going to Magrethea to find a “mythical” gun, giving him the coordinates to the lost planet in the process (why the Heart of Gold would need coordinates to find anything still puzzles, all these years later). He also takes the President’s second head and his third arm, perhaps so they’d never have to be acknowledged by Jennings and company again and prevent the effects budget from ballooning more. Malkovich seems to realize his own purposelessness here and seems to be sleepwalking through the role, and whatever role he serves as an antagonist is quickly forgotten once the film moves along.
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The gang already has a worthwhile purpose in finding Magrethea — indeed, some would argue the most worthwhile purpose of all time — and the Point-of-View gun that he sends the group to find is worth a chuckle or two, maybe, but it’s completely and totally unnecessary from a narrative stand-point. And sure, we can argue all day over whether or not a thing needs to be “necessary,” especially in the context of a comedy like this one, but, if you’re already having to cut significant portions of your narrative for time, why focus on preserving this particular character. Such choices wind up making the film feel long and unwieldy, distracting from the moment-to-moment pleasures that occasionally liven Jennings’ film up a bit. And, you think with a cast like that — which saw the three unknown-to-mainstream-audiences members explode in popularity in the aftermath — they would be a central feature, not a bug, though it’s still a bit weird just how stacked-to-the-gills this film is with Americans in the lead roles.
Yet, you’d be wrong: Each is stuck in their pre-mega fame chrysalis, perhaps with exception of Mos Def, who is roughly at the height of his career here (he’d bounce around a bit in larger projects after, like Richard Donner’s 16 Blocks or Michel Gondry’s tragically underrated Be Kind Rewind alongside Jack Black, but his acting career had ground to a halt by 2014). Freeman is still Tim from The Office, and a lot of his humor is meant to play off his awkwardness, such as his initial encounter with Trillian — had they decided to go with an American in the role, it’s easy to imagine John Krasinski taking over the same part with little difficulty. It would take a little bit for casting directors to realize that he was, well, better than that, and his post-Hitchhiker’s career has seen him delight in both Sherlock and the Hobbit series, in the latter of which he was the only good choice made in its making.
Deschanel, on the other hand, is probably the biggest crossover pop culture figure, having starred in Apple commercials, made loads of money for Merge Records with her band She & Him, and conquered both the big and small screens with successes in (500) Days of Summer and Fox’s New Girl. Here, she’s playing the same role she did in the early aughts — the love interest — though her hairstyle has codified into something immediately recognizable, unlike in, say, David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls or Jon Favreau’s Elf. And, yet, she has less to do here than in either of those films, with most of her best bits coming from her delighted reactions at things like… a lightsaber bread knife.
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But it’s Rockwell who has probably gone on to have the most distinguished career — after all, the dude did win an Oscar a few years back for his work in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, after years of being one of the cinema’s most beloved bit players and character actors. He was also by far the most promising member of the cast back then, as well: his work in George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is still superlative and set the tenor for his entire career. His performance here is fine, not great or terrible, with his Elvis-like costuming, with ascots and leopard-print capes, being perhaps the most memorable thing about his character before it descends into a cacophonous slapstick mess. He leans a bit too hard into Beeblebrox being a manic caricature of George W. Bush, which, given satirical art’s near nadir at that point in American history, feels apropos for the times. It’s really weird watching Vice and knowing that Rockwell, weirdly enough, is doing a riff on one of his lesser-known roles. He does have some solid gags — his reaction sells the famous bit about the Universe’s strongest drink, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster — but he really starts grating on one’s nerves by the time that the foursome reaches Magrethea.
It’s there that Arthur meets Slartibartfast (Bill Nighy), a creator of boutique planets, who, along with his team, designed the Earth millennia prior; and, after a brief tour of his pocket-universe factory (which still looks lovely all of these years later: their rail-mounted cart emerging into a beautiful universe is impressive in execution), learns the true purpose of the planet. You see, when Deep Thought woke from her thousand-year pondering, the computer had, in fact, reached the ultimate answer: 42. The only issue is that her programmers didn’t ask what the ultimate question would be. For that, they’d need an even stronger computer, which ultimately became the planet Earth. So, yes: the planet — and all of the beings on it — were ultimately participating in a million-year computational exercise.
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He also learns that mice, in fact, were the smartest beings on the planet, who had actually spent thousands of years supervising the project, and five minutes before it was supposed to deliver results, it was destroyed by an act of dumb bureaucracy, signed off on by Zaphod, who jotted his John Hancock on the demolition papers thinking he was signing an autograph. The mice, who were also stowaways on the Heart of Gold, reveal themselves to Arthur and the gang at a breakfast in a perfect replica of Arthur’s house. It’s there that they try to make a deal for Arthur’s brain, and when that fails, attempt to take it by force. They fail, of course, and the film ends with a newly-confident and willing-to-seize-the-day Arthur and his friends heading to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, setting up a sequel that would never come. It just didn’t make enough money to justify it.
Few careers would really be hurt by the film’s underperformance, as outlined above, but Jennings and Goldsmith would have a specialty market hit a few years later with Son of Rambow, and, eventually, the former would go on to direct Sing! for Illumination Entertainment. The Hitchhiker’s Guide series never really flagged in popularity, as it’s still being quoted and referenced by nerds the world over, for whom it is a formative text, but the film didn’t really attract a cult of fervent fans like you’d see form around other mediocre adaptations of nerd media (I’d compare it to Scott Pilgrim, whose director, Edgar Wright, has a cameo here, but even I can’t deny that the artistry in that film is miles above what’s on display here). And I think it’s because of how tied to its era it is — we don’t have the same nostalgia that we have for that particular moment on a cultural level, with all of its worldwide trauma-processing, cruelty, and gaudiness. It wasn’t made to be timeless like the books were: Jennings made this film for a particular moment, and when that moment passed by, whatever interest in it disappeared. The only true mystery is why someone hasn’t tried to make a streaming series out of Adams’ masterwork, as The Hitchhiker’s Guide feels perfect and primed for a long-format treatment.