"The frantic action keeps us watching, although it's exhausting--like watching a feature-length trailer."

April 29, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY'
The Way the World Ends, With a Shrug and a Smile
By MANOHLA DARGIS

In the hugely likable, long-awaited film of Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the world comes to an end not just with a bang, but also with something of a shrug. It isn't that Arthur Dent, the hero of our charmingly bent story, has no feelings for this cursed plot, this Earth. But being English - and played by Martin Freeman, the lovesick sales representative from the original British television series "The Office" - he generally faces even the most perilous bumps during his intragalactic tour with a degree of resignation. On one occasion, though, he does steady himself with a cup of tea.

Dent, it happens, has been saved from extinction by his alien buddy Ford Prefect (Mos Def), a smooth operator in a snow-white suit who fends off trouble with an ordinary bath towel and knows how to hitch rides on passing spaceships. Arthur and Ford initially land on such a ship, operated by the Vogons, an unpleasant race that constitute the bulk of the galaxy's bureaucracy and come equipped with expansive girths and lumpy porcine faces with smushed-in snouts. Beautifully constructed by the Jim Henson Creature Shop with an attention to expressive detail that recalls the political caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the Vogons function as the villains in this tale, though it is a measure of Adams's dry, gentle humor that the creatures' most devastating weapon is their exceptionally bad poetry.

Adams's ever-expanding "Hitchhiker" universe began in 1978 as a BBC radio series that went on to spawn a novel, still more radio episodes, albums, a television series, four more novels (the author called the books "a trilogy in five parts"), a stage play, comics and a computer game. For years, Adams and various would-be collaborators tried to add a movie to this list, but only after the writer died of a heart attack in May 2001 at age 49 did the project start to take real shape. Among the directors approached was Spike Jonze, an inspired choice given that all his films feel as if they take place on another planet. He demurred, but recommended two British music video and commercial directors who work under the impossibly severe name Hammer and Tongs.

Hammer and Tongs are actually Garth Jennings, who directed "Hitchhiker," and Nick Goldsmith, who served as one of the film's producers. Given their work's breezy mixture of high and low tech, geek-chic style and lightly skewed humor - their "Coffee and TV" music video for Blur features a walking, waving and smiling cartoon milk carton - it's easy to see why these unknowns received the nod (I suspect they were also comparatively cheap to hire). Like the other cinematic post-ironists, whose brightest lights include Mr. Jonze and another music director turned feature filmmaker, Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.

Artless, casually knowing and deeply goofy, the first "Hitchhiker" book may have been hip at one time, but what stands out today is just how much Adams seemed to have been enjoying himself. (It is a condition of hip never to admit to be having a good time.) The novel is zany, but its humor is remarkably unstrained and, for the most part, the same goes for the movie. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the name of the travel book Ford lends Arthur and which furnishes loads of practical information about the universe, has on its cover the legend "Don't panic." Mr. Jennings seems to have absorbed this sound advice. His filmmaking style is unrushed and - for a film stuffed with special effects - not overly busy, notwithstanding the Japanese schoolgirl with five torsos and one pair of knee-socked legs.

The hydra-headed schoolgirl pops up on a foggy planet, where Arthur, Ford and two other space travelers - an easygoing Earth girl with the moniker Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) and the president of the galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox (a sensational Sam Rockwell, riffing on Elvis and the current President Bush) - drop by for an atmospheric visit. This brief sojourn, which builds on a bit lifted from the second "Hitchhiker" book, doesn't really serve the plot, which is a relief, given that plot isn't the point. (The point of this particular episode is a patently freaky turn by John Malkovich.) The screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, who shares credit with Adams, has written that the novelist admitted that his first book is a story with "a long beginning and then an ending." The same is more or less true of the movie.

This narrative bagginess is partly what makes the film feel true to Adams, if not in precise letter then certainly in mellow spirit. One of the pleasures of this loopy adventure - along with its gloriously singing dolphins and knit puppets - is that what keeps the story in gear are the moments when its four space trekkers - and Marvin, the depressed robot mellifluously voiced by Alan Rickman - are chattering about all manner of cheery nonsense. In the years since "Blade Runner" cast its long dark shadow, most science-fiction cinema has set a course for dystopia. When he blew up the planet in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams knew that despite everything, there were a few things about human beings worth keeping - friendship, laughter and, of course, those exceedingly useful opposable thumbs.