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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jeffh" data-source="post: 2212091" data-attributes="member: 2642">Here's my review, which has already appeared on Usenet and the mailing lists for my groups. Warning: it does contain a few mild spoilers.[sblock]Don't panic. "That review" was wrong.Not as badly wrong as I'd hoped, but a lot more wrong than I'd feared. The movie is smart, funny, and true to the spirit of Douglas Adams' novels and radio plays. It's well worth seeing for any fan of Adams' work and would make a good introduction as well, though ultimately you still can't be a proper geek without reading the novels.I'll get the bad out of the way first. It's true that one of my favorite parts, the conversation with Prosser near the beginning, got massacred. (In fact, the beginning as a whole moves rather too fast.) I don't care how badly you need to squeeze the plot into the time available, you do NOT cut the line "On display? They were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware the leopard'."It's also true that the whole movie is held together by improbable coincidences. But it's The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy for heaven's sake. Criticizing it for being disjointed is like complaining that the ocean is too wet. To me, that's always been a big part of what it's *about*. Besides, the characters are zipping around the galaxy in a ship powered by *what* again? It seems to me that a number of people who were perfectly accepting of that element of the radio plays and the books (where there wasn't always such a good excuse available) are suddenly surprised to find exactly the same thing in the movie (where there is).Trillian is a disappointment. Her intellectual achievements from the books are neither mentioned nor otherwise in evidence.  Indeed, I would have to say she's an entirely different character, and one that I wasn't as keen on as her predecessor. She gets relegated to the getting-rescued role in one of the new plotlines and to a gender stereotype (though a pretty funny one) in the other.And the new parts of the plot, while much more in the spirit of the original than I had feared, nevertheless tended to be among the weaker parts of the film. I think something like them was needed in order for the pacing to be right for a movie, and they certainly were not the huge disappointment I was worried about, but when I think of my favorite parts of the movie, they aren't what jumps to mind (though I did like Arthur and Zaphod's improbable team-up in navigating the Vogon bureaucracy). And what one of the two new characters is doing following Jeltz around is never explained, since you would think from her position and what her motives turn out to be that this is the last thing she would want to do.So what did I like? First and foremost, Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin. Brilliant. It's like the role was written with him in mind all along. I must be the only Hitch-Hiker's fan in the world who was never really sold on the Paranoid Android in the previous versions. Rickman gave me a new appreciation for the character (with some help from Warwick Davis, who manages to convey a lot more expression than you would think that costume would allow). In fact, lines that didn't seem funny to me before are *much* better if I imagine Rickman delivering them, as I discovered when I found myself quoting one over dinner afterward.While in some cases, beloved sequences and lines have been jettisoned to the movie's detriment, in other cases I think it was a help. In particular, the over-long and rather sub-par sequence just after Ford and Arthur get picked up by the Heart of Gold - which is in ALL the previous versions - has been replaced with a single line that's *MUCH* funnier than anything in the original (though the infinite monkeys are somewhat missed).[The author of "that review" *says* he understands that concessions have to be made to the length and expectations of a movie, but he doesn't. He *says* he's not criticizing things just for being different, but he is. Okay, okay, I promise I'll stop mentioning him.]Speaking of the Heart of Gold and its Improbability Drive, the effects of it are, at least to me, *MUCH* better done than in any previous version. There are lots of good gags, most of them visual, around it that are found in no previous version.The Vogons are better used than in any previous version.Creepy, creepy (and somewhat underused) John Malkovich as one of the new characters. He does his part really well, even if it wasn't a favorite sequence on the whole.Suitably sequel-hunting ending.And lastly, there is the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself. Stephen Fry, who was the voice of the book in all the previous versions {ADDED ON EDIT: This error of mine has since been corrected by Nik Landauer on Usenet. My apologies in particular to Peter Jones, the originalvoice of the book} as well, is as wry as ever, and some of the animationsthat go with the Guide entries... definitely something else. (Personal favorite:Vogons.) By the end I was about ready to cheer whenever a Guide entrystarted up. And contrary to what you may have heard, there are quite a fewof them, including at least one entirely new one and a personal favorite thatwas in the radio plays but not in the books or TV series. In some we see the animated Guide entry (quite different from the ones in the TV series), others are voice-overs in scenes that we don't really need (or want, in the case of the Vogon poetry session) the sound for anyway.The majority of the Guide entries must have been added back in *after* some of the preview screenings we've seen reviews of, because there were far more of them than the early reviews made it sound like (especially... oops, I said I wouldn't mention him again).  They also explain nearly all the things I've seen those reviewers worry that newcomers wouldn't understand, if that helps reassure anyone.There were a few other minor things I found that I preferred to previous versions as well. Zaphod's extra head - while I'm no happier than anyone else with the pez-dispenser implementation - is there for a better reason and plays a much bigger role in the plot than before. And some of the characters actually meet Deep Thought, which I always thought would have been nice. On the whole, this is an enjoyable interpretation of Adams' work. For every scene or line that's been dropped or reduced in importance, a throwaway line has been turned into a genuine plot element, or at least a better gag than it was the first time around. In fact, I was impressed with the attention to the details of the previous versions that the filmmakers showed, even if the significance of some of those details has changed. Get off your butt and go see it already.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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