Hitchhikers Guide Movie Might Become a Trilogy 502
Noiser writes "The BBC reports that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie could be turned into a trilogy. I wonder if they mean that it might turn into a trilogy in five parts, just like the book? I wish it did - unlike some people, I liked all of them..."
So long, and thanks (Score:1, Interesting)
True, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hooray! (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Five parts? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only joke that they tried to include but destroyed was the leopard joke at the beginning. I can't think of any others that got swallowed like that.
Are you wearing my underwear? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Scripts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why does everyone keep doing this? (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't mind LoTR; sure the movie changed some things but I accepted that those changes probably helped it in the new medium. However, the H2G2 movie, irregaurdless of whether there had been a book before, was just bad.
Re:Ugh. What a disappointment. (Score:2, Interesting)
That would be Douglas Adams. Just pray he has some old, rotten bowl of Cheerios in his grave so that you won't have to piss on his corpse if there aren't any.
Have a nice day.
Re:If they were to bring in Terry Gilliam as direc (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dirk Gently (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If they were to bring in Terry Gilliam as direc (Score:2, Interesting)
If they removed the Vogons who made the movie... (Score:3, Interesting)
I know people have poo-poo'd the often repeated criticism of the change in an early line where Arthur Dent is telling the head of the (human) demoltion team about the trouble of finding the plans for the bypass. But that change says a lot about the movie.
Line from book/tv series:
"It was in the basement
Line in the movie:
"It was in a cellar"
The book showed the level of absurdity that bureaucracy causes. This basis of the joke in the book then continues when the Vogons use similar bureaucracy when telling humans where the plans for the hyperspace bypass are. But with the movie killing the basis of the bureaucracy joke, the Vogon part is far less funny as that joke is no longer built on anything previous.
I am not a "fanboy" wanting an exact word for word duplication of the book. The ridiculousness of bureaucracy could have been shown or stated in several ways in that eary scene, without quoting the book. But the fact that there was no emphasis on ridiculous bureaucracy shows a total lack of understanding of the whole scene. Unfortunately, the entire movie is the same lack of "getting it".
I want a coherent cohesive story that carries jokes forward and understands that humor relies heavily on context. No context means no humor. And the people/Vogons who made this movie clearly had no understanding of the context of Douglas Adams jokes. I hope to god that these same people have nothing to do with any further Hitchhikers movies.
Re:Scripts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I didn't like (Score:3, Interesting)
As a piece of existentialist horror it is unmatched; even the great French philosophers like Satre on his best day couldn't invoke the true horrors of the Whole Sort of General Mish-Mash, a direct consequence of the Many Worlds hypothesis (though Many Worlds doesn't imply that you can travel on the "probability axes", the horror, ultimately, is the same).
In some sense, it's his greatest work, but since it is "great" because it confronts consequences of certain surprisingly popular beliefs head-on, it is not always a pleasing sort of "great". If you are a believer in the Many Worlds hypothesis, this book really lays out on the line how existentially horrible it is; the Total Perspective Vortex squared. That can be particularly unsettling.
I do not accept the hypothesis, so I can look at the book with a bit more detachment, but even so, it is truly a stark look at the entire Universe. I'm not sure I can think of anything that is more darkly humorous, and given the somewhat light-heartened tone of the rest of the series (sure, the Earth is destroyed, but that's just an excuse to have a bit of fun, right?), it's a shocker, even after So Long and Thanks for All The Fish sort of warmed you up for it.
If I were going to throw anything he's written at a literary type, it'd be Mostly Harmless. For the same reasons I say that, a casual reader is likely to find it their least favorite. And it is my least favorite too... but I no longer hate it, and I even have a grudging respect for it.
Better not follow all the books (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why does everyone keep doing this? (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought Trillian's character was more true to how I remembered the books (smart, not idiotic) and it felt a lot less like a school play with the principals still reading from a script.
My only real complaint from the movie is that they killed the mice instead of sending them back with how many roads must a man walk down (which is my memmory from the book, but it's been a while).
The movie could of benifitted from the towel not being left as an inside joke too, but whatever.
I've seen the movie (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the movie was actually much better than I realized, and the subtlety of it was just lost on me until now. Adams, in writing the screenplay, was subjecting the audience to a kind of protracted version of a Vogon poetry reading! It was life imitating art...
Re:Ugh. What a disappointment. (Score:3, Interesting)
Will they make Arthur into a romantic lead again, instead of the hapless bumbler he was meant to be?
Oddly enough, he's quite competent and assertive in the original radio series. Several of his best lines are given to Ford (or innocent bystanders) in the books and TV series, creating the effect that he is overall less competant.
Re:Trilogys happen after big returns from film one (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't need to be. It only needs to make a profit. It had a budget of $45 million and in 3 days it made half that. That's ONLY in the US.
Re:ok.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Terrific!
Now if the next movies can manage to actually be funny, we will really have something.
Re:If they removed the Vogons who made the movie.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. I didn't think for a moment that they'd do the sperm whale joke, but they did. I was happy.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
I saw the movie, and, quite frankly, I didn't really care that they added in a "Hello, Ground!" to the Sperm whale bit or took out the Guide's entry on towels (especially since, in the radio series, it would have fallen into the Restaurant Fits) or hid Zaphod's head and third arm or even made Marvin into a robot iPod with a gigantic head, all of which are the only complaints that
The problems start when they change Zaphod from someone who should have been so cool you could keep a side of meat in him for a month into someone whose brain is fueled by lemons, or when the dolphins' final message to humankind becomes an aggravating Broadway-sounding number that will make you absolutely sick of the words "So long, and thanks for all the fish!" by the time the movie is over.
I especially liked seeing the Guide's entries animated, and all the jokes were straight on with the radio series and the books, but the real problem is that the whole thing just smacks of Disney-fication, from the romance twixt Arthur and Trillian to the ending, which reminds me very strongly of Bambi for sheer happiness.
What I'm really hoping here is that (Score:4, Interesting)
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They left the earth intact at the end of the movie. This, to mean, implies that they've given themselves a perfect opportunity to take after the original radio show and destroy the earth in every single installation of the movie trilogy, in a different way. I hope they take it
Re:Ugh. What a disappointment. (Score:4, Interesting)
"After Adams' death, screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick was called in to tighten up the script's structure, bolstering the romance and streamlining the plot." (italics mine)
Sounds an awful lot like the romance was troweled on after DA was no longer around to object. What with it being totally non-witty and not really fitting with anything else, I'd have to say that chances are good that Douglas Adams did not and would not have tarted up the romance like that.
It also sounds to me like all the subtle stuff that Americans wouldn't get anyway (yes, I'm being sarcastic and kind of pissy about it) was smoothed over, by Karey Kirkpatrick, to make it more shallow and easily digested for the Hollywood audience. I won't go into my rant about how streamlining and simplifying LOTR for the big screen reduced it to an FX extravaganza whose plot and characterization were no more exciting than any one of hundreds of thousands of games of AD&D played out in basements and bedrooms all around the world... oops, I guess I did. Sorry.
But that's how I feel about HHGTTG on the big screen, too. The genius is in the details, and Hollywood doesn't want genius - Hollywood has no desire to leave cash in the pockets of morons, and would rather dumb it down than take a chance on not getting money from everyone.
As an example: I think that when you skip the entire dialog about the plans being in the basement, where the lights had gone out, in a locked cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Tiger" or however the phrasing went, you also lose a great deal of the whimsy that made HHGTTG so brilliant. And the parallel between the bureaucrats in charge of destroying Arthur's house and those destroying Arthur's planet is damn near lost altogether.
Fortunately, I was already prepared for this movie to miss the point, so it didn't hit me too hard. YMMV.
Re:My such divided opinions (Score:3, Interesting)
I liked it more than I expected, but given the reviews here I wasn't expecting much. I think it has a different *type* of humor than the previous installments, more visual. Some of the effects were *very* funny. The inexcusable bobbling of the Prosser incident (if they were going to do it that badly they should have left it out) and the lame underplaying of Ford were disappointing but the casting and performance of Zaphod and Trillian were so brilliant I very much forgive them.
I will forever think of W as President Beeblebrox from now on, which alone was not only worth the price of admission but somehow softens the pain of actually seeing the man.
I think this is an important movie in the history of silly movies actually, the first where big budget effects were played as comedy.
Re:If they removed the Vogons who made the movie.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The movie was okay. I mean, it wasn't terrible, and it wasn't great. It was just okay.
"Why?" I wondered. I didn't feel that the dialog was outrageously different from the books. There were a few deviations, but I actually welcomed them so I'd have something interesting to watch the movie for, instead of just mouthing the words along with the characters ("lunchtime, doubly so").
I then realized why I love the books, but I've never really been interested in the BBC series or in the radio show. The reason is because it's DNA's fiendish love of garden path sentences, of long and garish lines of prose that make the reader stop and parse the same sentence several times, popping words off their mental stack in different orders each time, before they find the one that makes sense, that make the books so hilarious. It's the short and witty lines that work beautifully in book form, but fail to make me even chuckle when presented in a theater ("exactly the way that bricks don't").
The books were hilarious not because of the storyline, or the clever plot, or even the funny jokes--they were hilarious because of DNA's writing style. And that writing style, sadly enough, just doesn't carry over into the Hollywood scene, regardless of how much freedom he had to make the movie exactly how he wanted it. Unfortunately, taking a hilarious writing style and making a movie where a British accent reads paragraphs in that writing style does not a hilarious movie make.
Dlugar
Re:I thought they covered it all... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dirk Gently (Score:4, Interesting)
FYI, speaking as a total DNA fan and (less) DW fanboy, you're bang on. It was originally conveived as a DW adventure in the Tom Baker era, but there was a strike on set which cut short the series on which DNA was script editor (another story, 'Shada', was only half completed) and DNA stopped writing for DW. He noodled around with the plot for aver ten years before finding a way to re-use it without it being *too* damn obvious.
The idea was that a Time Lord had retired to Cambridge to live a long and peaceful last regeneration, knowing that no-one would ever bother him. The Cambridge colleges are notoriously unenquiring of human oddity! Supposedly, he had been there a very *very* long time and had forgotten everything that came before.
Justin.
Re:Better not follow all the books (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If they removed the Vogons who made the movie.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Low point: Don't even think about them, because that would take away the enjoyment I did get out of it.
High point: The Magrathea factory floor really benefited from a big special effects budget. Of course we won't say anything about whether or not that was central to the movie.
****SPOILER****
Really Good Point: When Trillian picks up the tiny light sabre with the 6 inch blade, and slices her bread into toast with it. One brief scene skewers the Great Weapon of Star Wars, trivializing it in a toss-off gag.
if the first movie is any indication.... (Score:2, Interesting)
So, yeah, I enjoyed it... but did the movie have any purpose? Did it enhance the experience of the book? No, I don't think so. And I truly feel sorry for the people who see the movie without having read the book first. What a pointless excersize that would be.
Do yourself a favor -- go read all the books and don't worry about the movie(s).
Re:I've seen the movie (Score:4, Interesting)
When I saw that the vogon ships were not yellow. I almost ran out of the theater. I was SO pissed off. IT RUINED THE MOVIE FOR ME!!!
Flamebait + 1.
I know what you are saying. I agree with you on some accounts. From dicussions with the director which I've read on slashdot, and other places, they kept on saying that things were edited for pacing issues. This was one of the things that I noticed in the beginning of the movie. The pace was fast, really fast. When the vogons were reading the poetry, it went by so fast, that the joke was lost. That is where the pace should have slowed down to halt to show just how bad the vogon poetry is. It's supposed to make the audience cringe, and then pick up the pace again. It seemed like everything was just flying by. So yes, I see what you are saying. Then again, on the other hand. The opening credits with the Dolphins singing a broadway musical about thanks for all the fish was brilliant. I absolutely loved it.
Even though some of the classical jokes from before were glossed over, I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Also the field of slapping shovel creatures was great. That is something that wouldn't work at all in the book, or radio series, but worked really well in the movie.
Also remember that lots of the changes where douglas' idea.