I would've been more entertained by watching Douglas Adams rolling around in his grave for 100 minutes.

Whilst i don't hate the movie, i don't exactly love it either. I grew up in England reading the books, listening to the radio show and watching the BBC TV show. The books were fantastic, the radio show was very good and the TV show did a really great job in getting the right actors and translating the books (along with those nostalgic crappy BBC special effects). In fact i wish they had managed to continue the TV show and cover all the books here as this really held close to the source material. I was excited to see this movie when i heard it was finally being filmed. I has doubts when i heard that Moss Def was going to play Ford Prefect...but i was going to be open minded. He turned out to be good in the film, its just that there was so much bullshit in the movie and they changed the story so much that it ruined it. The whole subplot with Malckovichs character is bollocks for a start. The way they did the two heads of Zaphod was just damn annoying. Plus when in the books was one of his heads just plain stupid? Both heads are suppossed to be normal Zaphod. I did like a lot of the designs and special effects from the movie. The Heart of Gold was fantastic and i liked Marvin....but he should have been smaller. I also liked seeing Magrathea and the design of Deep Thought. Zoey Deshanell as Trillian was terrible casting IMO. The movie got some things spot on, but other things terribly wrong. They needed to stick closer to the books and not create a bastard creation that just takes bits and pieces. I was hoping that this would develop into a full series covering all the books, but after seeing what they did with the first book i think they are better off leaving it as is.

I usually have no issues with book adaptations. For instance, as much as I love the Harry Potter books, I've had zero problems with any of the changes made for the movies. They all seem to work for me. In fact, I think the movies get better as they go along - the first film was basically a hacked version of the book. By the 4th, they are pretty much doing an alternate story, which is cool with me.

I loved the Douglas Adams books too, and was very excited for the film. It looked great from the previews. Hell, they got the falling whale in there, which is my favorite part of the entire series. But in the end I was just...bored. It wasn't particularly hilarious, it felt VERY rushed and they should have done a cleaner adaptation, cutting things that didn't really matter (like the whale part, for instance.)

So I'm not a purist or anything, movies and books are two different mediums entirely. But that didn't help me enjoy the movie.

The biggest problem with the film is too much time and effort was spent on a rom-com sub-plot that wasn't present in any of the source material.

Do you really think he hated his own screenplay that much?

It was too short ... I'm still waiting for the Director's Uncut Extended Out-of-this-World 6-disc extreme limited special edition.

I loved it, and enjoy it more everytime I watch it. It exceeded my expectations.

It depends on how much Karey Kirkpatrick changed it, since Douglas's was anywhere from 60 to 80% complete but definitely not finished, as far as I know.

I'll put down $20 that Douglas Adams had no hand in what became the final shooting script.

In a way, adding a lame romantic subplot almost made it more authentic. Douglas Adams was terrible at writing romance, and female characters in general. Arthur mentioned falling in love with Trillian at a party before she got swept away by Zaphod, but then that's never really touched on again, at least in the first two books. Trillian got completely written out of the radio series in the second part by a one sentence explanation of her getting kidnapped and forcibly married to the president of the Galactic Rotary Club, to which no one seems very concerned. Now all of sudden Arthur's apparently running away with Lintilla even though he's only known her for about five minutes. That subplot was dumped when the ending was changed to Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Of course Arthur would later fall instantly in love with Fenchurch for no particular reason in the mostly abysmal So Long and Thanks for all Fish, which thankfully was Douglas Adams only attempt at writing a full-on romantic comedy. Then Fenchurch gets hastily written out of the series as well in the first two pages of Mostly Harmless, just in time for Trillian to return, dump a kid on Arthur, and then leave again. I hope Douglas Adam's love life wasn't as messed as his character's.

The only positive thing I could say about this movie is that it was better than Tideland.