A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Date Viewed: 5/1/05

Details:

Martin Freeman (Arthur Dent)

Mos Def (Ford Prefect)

Zooey Deschanel (Trillian)

Sam Rockwell (Zaphod Beeblebrox)

John Malkovich (Humma Kavula)

Helen Mirren (Deep Thought, voice)

Bill Nighy (Slartibartfast)

Alan Rickman (Marvin, voice)

Anna Chancellor (Questular Rontok)

Director: Garth Jennings

Score: 1/2

The Review: A manic, marginally incoherent translation to the big screen of the opening book of Douglas Adam's beloved -- well, only among certain audiences, I would wager -- five-volume trilogy.

The novel is famous for its opening sequence -- in which Earth as we know it is destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass -- and for its calming slogan, "Don't panic!" An alien (Def as Ford Prefect) grabs his unsuspecting Earth friend (Freeman as Arthur Dent) and hitchhikes their way off the planet in the final seconds before its destruction. But when your spaceship has an "improbability drive," then all sorts of unusual coincidences can be expected to occur, and this is illustrated almost immediately when the hitchhiking pair are ejected from the Vogon destructor fleet, and just in the nick of time picked up by the very folks they seek in the final seconds before asphyxiating in the vacuum of space. Things continue in this same weird vein -- coupled with jumping cross the galaxy in mind-wrenching steps -- with occasional bumps in the road, some outrageous humor, and one or two instances of fantastic (space-opera quality) scope of vision (e.g., Nighy as Slartibartfast, and what he does for a living).

(30-Jul-05)

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