Odds & Ends

I wrote a while back about how much I was looking forward to the new movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so I thought it was worth commenting briefly on the ruckus over M.J. Simpson's review of the film. For those that don't lurk around the geeky corners of the internet, Simpson - a writer with a pretty impressive CV when it comes to writing about Adams - wrote a long, spoiler-filled review of the film (which you can find here). Previous to this, most of the reviews that had leaked out from preview screenings had been pretty positive: often they said a few things needed to be changed, but even that didn't seem outrageous given that the whole point of these screenings was to fine-tune the film.

Simpson's review, however, is very negative. Indeed, it couldn't possibly be more negative. Take the concluding paragraph, which is one of the kinder parts:

Hitchhiker's is not so bad that it's good. It's just miserably, depressingly bad. It misses the point by a light year. Is it a good movie? No. Is it a good version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Definitely not. It is ill-conceived, badly written, poorly directed and worst of all staggeringly unfunny. It is a travesty of a film. I mourn for it, I really do.

This review was picked up and run all over the net, including on some of the internet's most widely seen sites (such as Slashdot and Ain't It Cool), and was starting to look like the Internet age equivalent of the Vincent Canby review that famously sunk Heaven's Gate before it was even released. There were various defences of the film mounted from those that had seen the rough cuts (one is on the Ain't It Cool post linked above), but probably the most decisive action to limit the damage to the film's pre-release buzz has been Simpson's own response to the furore he created. Basically he took his bat and ball and went home, closing his website with an angry response to those who had attacked his review (quoted here only in part):

I could put up with the pathetic, jealous ramblings of those sad types who feel the need to criticise something they haven't read, describing something they haven't seen. But what has broken my will is the vitriolic personal abuse and libel which has started spreading across the net from various individuals who don't know me. (A more paranoid person than myself might think that some of these, the ones who have joined discussion boards in the past week and since then posted on no other subject than myself, were studio plants. But not I.) In particular, I am fed up with the no-lifes who constantly post abusive messages on this site's guestbook and then post more abusive messages complaining that the previous ones have been deleted. It is these people in particular who are responsible for the removal from the web of this unique resource. Nobody else in the world has the network of Adams-related contacts that I have, or sufficient knowledge of his life and work to be able to put any piece of news into context, which is why there is no other site providing a service anything like this, and from now on there won't even be this. These people can be found on the IMDB board crowing about their work - please direct any complaints to them.

With one masterstroke, Simpson has turned himself from the Douglas Adams expert who hated the film into a thin-skinned geek who can dish out criticism but can't take it. The film's distributors must be delighted.

What's my take on all this? Well - as Simpson himself sensibly points out - one can't really respond terribly effectively without seeing the movie (and I do expect to review the film in early May at Cinephobia). But you can certainly see why people got upset about the review. Virtually the first thing Simpson chokes on is some product placement, pointing out that Arthur makes conspicuous use of a Nokia phone: but why shouldn't Arthur use a mobile phone, and if he does so, it's going to be some make of phone isn't it? The definite impression this gives is that Simpson had a bad attitude to the film going in: if he's picking up something as minor as this near the start of the film, how could he be giving the film a fair chance?

Simpson's recurring complaint, however, is the loss of Adams' funny dialogue. For example, he cites the loss of the exchange between Arthur and Mr Prosser early in the film about exhibition of some planning documents:

The problem with this example is that this is dialogue that most definitely should be cut in a film adaptation. It is, basically, the same joke hammered three times, and the film can't be sitting around for an extended opening sequence on Earth.

This has been the most consistent response to Simpson's review: that he has unrealistic expectations of how an adaptation should work, and in his closing message on his website angrily denies that this is the case. Yet his review does indeed create that impression. For example, he claims that:

...speaking of running times, let us never forget that this movie is adapted from a novel which was based on only four radio episodes, ie. two hours of material, so there really shouldn’t be any need to cut too much out.

This ignores the fact that cinema works fundamentally differently from radio: the separation of sound from image on radio means you can whip through events really quickly with a sound effect in a way that just doesn't work on film. Furthermore, the radio series was designed to be heard in shorter episodes, not as a two hour block, which means the pacing has to be fundamentally different. Just a few paragraphs later, Simpson mentions of the early sequences that:

...what took an hour on TV and radio is crammed into about 15 minutes here.

Which is exactly why the pacing of the TV or radio versions can't be used as a basis for the film as Simpson has earlier suggested. If the film took an hour to get Arthur off the Vogon ship it would be a disaster, pacing-wise. (For all the pleasures of the TV version, its pacing is terrible).

None of this is to say that I'm not worried about some aspects of the film that Simpson cites. It does sound like they've pretty much jettisoned the plot of the novel, which is a shame. Simpson is right when he notes that despite the tendency of Adams to alter the story somewhat in different incarnations (radio series, album, novel, TV series, computer game), there is a core plot for the early sections of the story that doesn't change much for the variant versions. What's more - and unusually for Adams - it's a pretty solidly constructed one, leading from the demolition of Earth to the discovery of Earth Mark II and the big revelation of how the Earth came to be. Adams' tendency to wander off the plot of the novel in later years seems to have come from boredom more than any well thought out creative vision.

Oh well. We'll see for ourselves when the film comes out I suppose.