When dolphins are flipping, twisting and leaping into the sky for the first several minutes of a movie, the production in question must be a huge gamble or a huge joke. Fortunately, \The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"" is both.
As a gamble, the movie has to justify itself. Douglas Adam's radio program of ""Hitchhiker's Guide"" has been floating around since 1978. Its novelization and following works have built up a cult following. By putting the book on the big screen, director Garth Jennings is taking the risk of alienating the fanatics while entertaining everybody else. ""Hitchhiker's Guide"" has always been on the cusp of being too nerdy for the mainstream, but too clever for the mainstream to ignore.
As a joke, ""Hitchhiker's Guide"" as a movie needs to match the madcap foolishness the book offers. Here the jump across media is a staggering challenge. Jokes about digital watches, luxury planets and whales falling from the sky are difficult to pull off in print and only slightly easier when they are made visual.
The sheer foolishness that Adams put together in his book is suited to punch lines which require manic hyphenation and capitalization, like with the phrase Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic, and names that cannot possibly be pronounced correctly, like Zaphod Beeblebrox and Slartibartfast.
Making the language work as spoken jokes is more critical than lining up a cast that works as an ensemble. The friendship between Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) and Ford Prefect (Mos Def) amounts to nothing if Dent's reaction to Prefect's revelation as an alien is weak. Saying lines about being from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse only works if Freeman and Def can make such revelations convincing.
The movie takes a little time to establish its premise as two hours of improbability. The opening dolphin sequence and the bulldozing of Dent's house are nominally humorous, but do not bring the movie up to speed as quickly as the book does. Adams' second paragraph is hilarious, but Jennings' first minute lacks the necessary mastery of tone the author had. The plot's pace, though occasionally hurried, matches Adam's humor with Jennings' style.
Vogons, an astonishingly ugly race of bureaucrats, show up with a destructor fleet, surround Earth and blow it up. Meanwhile, Dent and Prefect have hitched a ride on one of the Vogon ships and depend on their trusty towels to get them across space. But they are found, captured and subjected to Vogon poetry before being ejected into space.
Improbably, they are picked up in the Heart of Gold, a ship that can ignore any physical and plot constraint. Piloted by President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), with space cadet Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) and Marvin the Paranoid Android (acted by Warwick Davis and voiced by Alan Rickman), the Heart of Gold is pursued by half the universe. Beeblebrox, as a playboy, rogue and heinously dressed creature, is only barely in command, even with two heads and three arms.
Along the way, the ship runs into the Vogons a couple more times and winds up on Magrathea, a planet which used to build other planets. At the climax, when the entire disjointed journey comes to a destination, Dent rides along with Slartibartfast (Bill Nighy) through half-completed worlds and dreamt-of fjords. Those worlds pass by quickly, becoming a kaleidoscope instead of separate wonders.
Therein lies the main problem of ""Hitchhiker's Guide."" In the rush to get to the next joke, the film flies past its other strong points. The stunning scenery is just a blur, be it Vogon ships, the English countryside or the products of Magrathea. In between the characters are packed in. Beeblebrox is obviously too egotistical for both his heads, but never gratingly so. Prefect is funny but never shines while secondary characters like Humma Kavula (John Malkovich) are cut off just as they are getting on their numerous feet.
As the story is soaring along, Dent and Trillian are thrown together and wind up with each other. Their love story, which is painfully out of place in ""Hitchhiker's Guide,"" takes up too much screen time and is nothing but a distraction from the otherwise uproarious movie. Jennings should have listened to the guide and applied within the movie what it says about falling in love: ""Don't.""
