Sunday, June 19, 2005
Watched hitchhiker's guide n Tuesday, so its another movie review, at least a pseudo one.. Haha...
The Good
Okay a brief summary of the book and through that a summary of the movie. This is basically one of the completely irrelevant books of the 20th century. Part satire, part science fiction, Douglas Adams(the author in case u are wondering) wanted us to believe that the world is created by mice, that we are all in living in a experiment and will soon be destroyed by a Vogon constructor fleet(notice that its not a destructor fleet). Given the weird context of the book its not surprising that the movie is also quite quirky, and different. At least the parts that are adapted directly from the book have this original feeling to it.
The Bad
'So long and thanks for all the fish, So sad that it should come to this' was the opening to the movie, a pleasant surprise, until they decided to play it ala Mary Poppins over and over, so that it lasted something like 5 mins. A very bad way to start a movie whose target audience are teenagers. Instead of a completely fun movie or a tongue-in-cheek comedy, what u really get is a mish-mash of so many different scenes from the book and no clear line and link between them. To try to super-impose Mary Poppin's saccharine theme onto the movie is the second last nail in the coffin for this interpretation of the book.
And The Ugly
To see if a sence is redundant in the any movie, try to remove it and check to see if the movie still makes sense. In the case of this movie, the whole trillian-dent-beeblebox love affair was just a case in point, and its precisely so bad because it screws up the movie for those who want to see the book in moving colour. So now, those that did not read the book will not understand the movie and those that read the book will not like it.
While i agree that its really difficult to make a blockbuster out of a bestseller, i guess this one could be abit better. Something like 2.5 funny scenes in a 'humour' genre movie simply isn't good enough.
2:23 AM
