“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”-whether as book, radio drama or Internet discussion board-has an indelible sci-fi tone.
It’s the goofy, this-might-not-seem-as-funny-tomorrow sensibility of the nerds from the audio-visual club on the night they smoke their first weed.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Brit-geek Douglas Adams made an empire from this loopy chaos. Millions of fans woke up from their sophomore-year bender still laughing.
Now they have a pitch-perfect movie adaptation to reassure them that their cosmos is at once cruel, indifferent and comforting as a nice cuppa with scones.
The ostensible story line of “Hitchhiker,” dating to a 1978 radio show and the 1979 novel, is a juxtaposition of the domestic with the infinite.
British loser Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) wakes up one morning to find his country cottage about to be leveled by government road builders. The insipid bureaucrats explain their proposal was prominently on display for months, albeit locked in a basement file box.
Prostrating himself before the bulldozers, Arthur’s fate is suddenly interrupted by friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def), who drags him to the pub for a last beer and a reality check.
Ford, posing as an unemployed actor, is actually an interplanetary traveler who freelances for the indispensable “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Earth itself is about to be demolished, Ford explains to Arthur, by indifferent bureaucrats building a highway – who displayed their proposal prominently in a file drawer on another star system.
Relentless zaniness ensues, of the kind that makes college-level philosophy courses engrossing and insufferable.
What if on the verge of death you were picked up by a galactic spaceship? Are life’s big moments random or unavoidable? If fate were a sentient being, would he look like King Solomon or Jabba the Hutt? If the A/V geeks ever got a girlfriend, could she please, please, please look as cute as Zooey Deschanel, or does that tempt disaster?
Arthur wears his tattered bathrobe everywhere, hoping that his couch will be at the other end of the time warp. Turns out dolphins are smarter than people, and gosh are they dreamy to watch. Hulking, slobbering bureaucrats wreak universal havoc on humanoid life forms, but they break for lunch and hope cheddar-broccoli is the soup of the day. It’s all treacle with a few shards of safety glass stirred in.
The director, therefore, has to hire good actors, build sets as reassuringly silly as Adams’ imagination, and hope for the best.
Garth Jennings found a romantically shlumpy Arthur, and builds him up with Alan Rickman as the voice of a depressed robot, Bill Nighy as a kindly planet designer, and Sam Rockwell as the arrogantly dim president of the galaxy. Rockwell in particular decides everyone else will have fun if he does, and hams it up admirably with a slothful swagger reminiscent of Jim Carrey channeling Bill Murray.
A coherent story is unnecessary in Adams’ plot-smashing particle accelerator. The hitchhikers’ spaceships have Improbability Drives, requiring randomness rather than continuity from the filmmakers. Necessary explanations – for those not on their fourth reading of the novels – are provided by cheap computer graphics in line with the spoofy spirit of the proceedings.
Along the way, all is gently ridiculed: politics, religion, science, poetry. Just like everyone else in sophomore year, Adams knows just enough to be unbearably right all the time. Since life, the universe and everything are unpredictable and stacked against us, the thinking goes, find somebody to love and stay loyal to friends.
Surprise, it works. “Hitchhiker” is a one-off parody of a certain moment in arrested adolescence, but it’s a charming way to look at the world.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
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“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
PG for mild language and thematic elements|1 hour, 40 minutes|SCI-FI COMEDY|Directed by Garth Jennings; written by Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick, from the novel by Adams; starring Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Nighy and Warwick Davis|Opens today at area theaters.
