Thursday, April 28, 2005

I've heard Vogon poetry and lived to tell about it!

I went ahead and saw The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, and I actually thought that it was both pretty enjoyable and pretty bad. Yes, you read that right. I found it enjoyable, because I won't deny that I had a pretty good time, I laughed a fair bit,and the I found the visuals to be quite fantastic. At the same time a lot of really good comedy that worked on the printed page and on the radio shows is quite frankly gone. Most of the lines were changed for no good reason, others added which fall flat on their face, big time; the plot has been completely reworked, characters given new motivations and worst of all, they miss the point.

It's very strange, because it is as though the directors and screnwriter made the movie based on what a friend, an a drunken one at that, told them what the movie was about, and used that as their plot. But at the same time everyone else involved in their film made an absolutely incredible film (given what they had to work with) such as the Vogons, for instance, which are simply wonderful, as is everything else around them.

In other words everything that made the book and radio show good is pretty much gone, but, the movie is stil enjoyable. I promise to put further thoughts later on