In trying to shoehorn one of the more chaotic tales ever written into a standard Hollywood plot, the magic that makes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy such a sci-fi geek legend gets lost.
It all starts in England, when befuddled Everyman Arthur Dent wakes to find his house has been scheduled for demolition to make room for a highway bypass. As he lays in a bulldozer's path, his friend Ford Prefect arrives with news that, A) he is an alien correspondent for a book titled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and B), the Earth has been scheduled for demolition to make room for an interstellar bypass.
Seconds before the explosion, Ford and Arthur manage to get themselves beamed aboard one of the demolition spaceships that belong to the Vogons. If you can imagine an entire planet of creatures that are a mix between Teresa Heinz Kerry, Al Gore and a giant muppet that's vomited its head up through its neck, you'll have the general idea. Narrowly escaping execution, Ford and Arthur are accidentally rescued by Tricia McMillian (a girl Arthur had recently met and been smitten with at a party) and Zaphod Beeblebrox (president of the galaxy and the alien who stole Tricia away from Arthur at the party just when Arthur imagined things were getting good).
From there, the quartet, along with Marvin, the paranoid android (who's really simply suicidally depressed but that doesn't rhyme) go bouncing around the cosmos in their stolen spaceship, fleeing the Vogon destructor fleet and its ensuing bureaucracy while trying to find a Point of View gun for Zaphod's political rival (John Malkovich, as creepy as ever), discover a planet that's not supposed to exist, and locate a computer that will provide the question to the answer of life, the universe and everything (the answer is 42; it's the phrasing of the question that's now the tricky part).
While many fans might have already slammed on the brakes at the mention of the POV gun—something never written about in any of the five books of the Hitchhiker trilogy—rest easy knowing that the whale and bowl of petunias survived the translation to screen intact. At least for a little while.
But the inclusion of the POV gun, a weapon which causes its target to instantly understand the point of view of the wielder, is an indicator of the movie's larger problems. Namely, the film is too concerned with plot.
Adams was inspired to create the first Hitchhiker's, a BBC radio play, when he was laying drunk in a field and wishing a spaceship would come and take him away. He wrote an episode or two and figured that was it. But the broadcasts got such a strong response, he was called back to write more and more. Which was all flattering to Adams at the time, but problematic in the sense that his books (and this is why there are five in the series of three) don't always have the strongest, most coherent plots. Coincidentally enough, this is also their charm. As the radio show became a play, and then possibly another play, and then a book, followed by a TV series and then more books, certain adjustments had to be made, and others should have but weren't.
Much of the fun of the books are asides Adams makes to readers, the annotations provided by the Hitchhiker's Guide itself (voiced quite well by Stephen Fry), and all of the tangents. The plot is purely incidental, and again, that's part of the charm. But in creating the film, Adams (who, ironically enough, died during rewrites at a California gym while waiting for his towel), Karey Kirkpatrick (who shares writing credits) and first-time director Garth Jennings lose a lot of that appeal, forcing the rambling epic into the strictures demanded by Hollywood. Tricia and Arthur develop a full-on romance, one of Zaphod's two heads is held hostage to provide motivation, and the POV gun and Marvin take on the role of deus ex machina—literally.
Certainly, the film has its amazing parts, parts that are like downing a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. The guide is beautifully done. The scenes of Arthur and coastline developer Slartibartfast (played wonderfully by Bill Nighy) on the factory floor of a business that manufactures worlds exceeds anything your imagination could come up with. And segments involving the Infinite Improbability Drive, in which people turn into sofas and knitted figures, are a joy.
Performances also exceed expectations. Sam Rockwell nails Zaphod, mixing equal parts carny huckster, party host, lunatic and some more huckster for spice. Mos Def as Ford and Martin Freeman as Arthur are perfectly matched foils, one at home with chaos and the other only wanting to go home. Only Zooey Deschanel comes across as unbelievable, especially when making moon eyes with Freeman.
But the best acting can't make up for a weak story, and if Adams were around today, he'd surely already be at work tinkering and talking about making a sequel that might wind up being a remake.