Hitch Hiker’s Guide to making a movie

As a kid I was entertained or sometimes tortured on long car journeys by Paul Simon’s Graceland, The Beatles’ Blue Album (A compilation), a set of rather inane children’s songs bought at a petrol station in Dover.  Between this, games of ‘I-Spy’ and “Botticelli” there was only one remaining refuge to alleviate boredom on these journeys, and that was Books On Tape.  Although The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings made an appearance after a family friend graciously copied them illegally for us as a Christmas present, the defining interlude was the tapes of Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

As I write this I’m sitting through the credit roll of the film that I have always avoided in case I hated it, or it ruined the whole thing for me.  The film is of course the HHGTTG movie that came out in about 2005 or 06, and I just watched it, in all 1 hour 38 minutes of abomination that it was.

Don’t get me wrong here, it was actually a sweet little story about space creatures and some people who are caught up in something, and like all Hollywood stuff it had it’s gradual good-guy-gets-the-girl process (because we all do nothing but yearn to be in a committed relationship, it’s all our little brains can cope with) but essentially the movie itself was similar to the result of giving the order “Write me a space play” to a load of screen-writers and following it up with “Oh yeah, and pick some key phrases from this book too” and a copy of HHGTTG.

Simple storyline for simpletons presented by the inane babble monster of commercial filmmaking, and suitably altered that the title was entirely unbased.  Sure, the spaceship was called the same, and the protagonist ended up in his situation for the same reason, but these matters aside, almost nothing was the same.  The storyline was mundane and straightforward, the characters depthless and moronic and all semblance of the original story carefully dumbed down to make it a film for kids, essentially.

The original HHGTTG was an existential black comedy in which the hero of the piece starts on a journey to find the meaning of life only to find without question that life is meaningless, and that he is instrument in proving this.  As part of the dark comedy, he loses the girl to the moron, and eventually (after 5 books) winds up dossing around looking for something vague and pointless in the middle of nowhere.  In the film, he finds a new place to live, and disappears off to dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe with the girl, who he has just won back.

As the film ends, it pays ‘tribute’ to Douglas Adams, the author of the original series with the words ‘For Douglas’.  Personally I think he’d consider this a profound f**king insult to his original work.

Anyway, I was looking for Hostel, not Hitchhikers Guide, so off to that now.

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