The Sound of the Crowd

I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed

Here’s a short advance review of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film. The review was written by a biographer of late writer Douglas Adams. He didn’t like it.

I’ve got bad feelings about it…Part of it is that, like Sin City, I’ve got images in my head of the way the Hitchhikers characters look and sound. Images that I don’t think the movie will match. (Granted, in HGttG’s case, some or most of that is from the TV version.)

Also in Hitchhikers case, I’m bothered by the fact that they only managed to get it made after Adams was no longer around to protect his characters. To say nothing of his dialogue.

Excerpts from the review follow. It’s spoiler-free, but there is also a link to a longer version of the review with spoilers.

“Douglas Adams was a dialogue writer. That was his skill – writing great dialogue. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good comedy writing is like poetry. It has a meter to it and when you get the right words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will do. Douglas’ dialogue was perfect. However, the makers of this film, despite all their talk of being faithful to Douglas’ intentions and ideals, have seen fit to piss about with his carefully crafted, wonderfully quotable lines.”

“There are quite a few nods to Douglas Adams himself and although these go some way to making up for the almost complete absence of his name from the publicity, surely a better way of paying tribute to this much-loved, much-missed author would be to not fuck about with the sublimely witty dialogue that he sweated blood to create.”


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