kgratton

The imagery in this film even caught the attention of my teenage son (briefly), but for someone who fondly remembers the books and BBC TV series it's simply too hard to watch this film without recalling that same TV series.

An ideal film would have had Simon Jones as Arthur, David Dixon as Ford, Steven Fry as the narrator, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian - and a director who had a clue about comic timing, and was prepared to incorporate more material from the book, less new material that was a waste of screen time.

Sorry to Martin Freeman, you're a great Bilbo, but you don't capture Jones' alternating mix of acerbic intellectualism and outright panic. Mos Def has none of Dixon's wide-eyed lunacy, and as much as I loved the work of the late Alan Rickman, he really should have watched the TV series as a primer for his voice-over of Marvin.

Fry was great, and clearly must have been influenced by the TV series, and I think Rockwell did very well with what was plainly a very different take on Zaphod for the film. More power to him. Bill Nighy was fine, but I miss Richard Vernon's Slartibartfast.

The film's visual effects were brilliant, especially the destruction of the Earth and the Magrathean shop floor. Credit too for the truly dingy look of the Vogon constructor ship.

Questions: Why does the Guide's animation look so awful in the film? And what was with the Humma Kavula sub-plot? It seemed to go nowhere, almost as if the character were to be reintroduced in a sequel. Less John Malkovich, more one-line comedy from the book, I say.

Garth Jennings directed this film without apparently any feel for the comedy of the source material. The lines were delivered too quickly, punchlines were lost. There were just two times I laughed out loud during the film. One was when Ford and Arthur dropped out of the Vogon ship, rather than being blown out. The other was Arthur saving Ford from being run down - and only then because the car Ford was trying to greet was a Ford Prefect. That would have gone right over the heads of most cinema-goers, I'm sure.

Of the other new material for the film, the point-of-view gun was a cute idea, but lacking the deadly, mind-warping scope of the total perspective vortex, which seems like a similar idea on a larger scale.

I hate that this review sounds like a whinge from someone set in his ways, but I truly believe comedy has been the biggest victim here. Perhaps someone sympathetic will take charge of this story with a reboot in about five or 10 years' time. I have my fingers crossed.