Guide to Meh

Well, I don't know. I was all full of dread and foreboding about the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, mainly that it would suck and ruin all my high hopes for a movie adaptation and in the worst case, put me off books forever.

I am happy to report that this was not the case at all, which is a plus.

But in general, I am less enthused with the movie than I hoped. It kept a lot of the spirit of the book, one might say, but it lost a lot in the translation. But then again I knew it would be like this, so I'm not exactly sure where I get off acting so disappointed in it. Ugh, this is so confusing-sounding and it should not be.

Okay, the books were great. And a reason they were great was because it was about a poor schlub who gets dragged around the universe after Earth is destroyed (Spoiler? Heh.) It's easily accessible and funny and that part gets carried off pretty well in the movie. Which is good.

But the thing that carried it over from just, y'know, a good book that you might read in passing to something that I have read about, roughly, 9 times in the course of my life, is the language and quirkiness that Adams managed to compact into every single line. Which is just impossible to get across in a movie, short of having a dramatic line-reading of the book on screen. And nobody wants that, even if we did get some of (read: a lot of) that in the movie anyways.

We did get some of those really sweet elements in there (the whale and the bowl of petunias, as a good example) that really worked and were both funny and true to the original. But more often than not, you get these things that are sort of funny, but mostly are missing what made them priceless in the first place (the destruction of Arthur's house and all the conversations around it, the babel fish, to name just two). So you get a taste of things that make you laugh, but mostly it's laughing at remembering the whole story from the book.

Which isn't to say that the movie was bad. Because it wasn't. There were things to laugh out loud about (I heart Alan Rickman) and it was cute and completely different and fun and I really liked the musical number about all the fish. All the actors were competent and good matches for their characters. I could have done without Sam Rockwell entirely, but it's a hard character to read, let alone play, so I'll give him a pass.

Um. So. Final Conclusion: I completely got my money's worth (read: Devon's money's worth, since she paid for my ticket. I am finally a kept man.) out of the movie, but it's doubtful I will ever go out of my way to see it ever again. But it did get me nostalgic enough that I want to go get a box set of all the books, since the only thing I have right now are pirated eBook versions.

Since when do movies always leave me so conflicted?