Product Description

ARTHUR DENT IS HAVING A REALLY BAD DAY! WHEN HE LEARNS THAT A FRIEND IS ACTUALLY AN ALIEN WITH KNOWLEDGE OF EARTH'S IMPENDING DESTRUCTION, HE IS TRANSPORTED OFF THE PLANET. AND IF THAT'S NOT ENOUGH, THROW IN BEING WANTED BY THE POLICE & A CHRONICALLY DEPRESSED ROBOT & YOU'VE GOT THE GREATEST ADVENTURE OFF EARTH.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4741 in DVD
• Brand: BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2005-09-13
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: DTS Surround Sound, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 109 minutes

Amazon.com

Don't panic! After twenty years stuck in development (a mere blink compared to how long it takes to find the answer to life, the universe, and everything), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has finally been turned into a movie. Following the radio play, TV series, commemorative towel, and books, this latest installment in the sci-fi-comedy franchise is based on the screenplay and detailed notes by Douglas Adams.

Hitching a ride.

For those unfamiliar with the story, everyman Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) wakes up one morning to discover that his house is set to be demolished to make room for a bypass. Little does he know the entire planet Earth is also set to be destroyed for an interplanetary bypass by the Vogons, a hideous and bureaucratic race of aliens realized in the film by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Whisked off the planet by his best friend, alien-in-disguise Ford Prefect (Mos Def), Dent embarks on a goofy jaunt across the galaxy accompanied by his trusty Hitchhiker's Guide, which looks like a really fancy PDA.

The guide itself provides some of the funniest bits of the movie, little animated shorts that explain the ludicrous life forms and extraterrestrial phenomena our heroes encounter. Along the way Arthur meets the two-headed party animal/president of the galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell) and develops an unrequited crush on fellow earthling Trillian (Zooey Deschanel). The creatures and sets are inspired and answer to the sci-fi fan's primal need to see lots and lots of cool stuff. In particular, there's John Malkovich's creepy, CGI-enhanced Humma Kavula. He's a guru leading a religion that worships the gigantic nose that allegedly sneezed the universe into existence (naturally all their prayers end not with "Amen" but with "Bless you.") The aliens the team encounters are inspired creations, eminently worthy of action figure-ification, and the sets belie an attention to detail worthy of freeze-framing. Fans of the other Hitchhiker manifestations, namely the British TV series, will be amused by a number of in-jokes sprinkled throughout the movie.

Concept art: The Heart of Gold pod on the planet Vogsphere

Where the story stumbles is in the telling--as books, the Hitchhiker's Guide was foremost about goofy and brilliant ideas that raised questions about our place in the universe while getting a laugh. The cast seems at times bewildered, at least when Sam Rockwell isn't picking pieces of scenery out of his teeth, perhaps a natural reaction to an adaptation of a book with no traditional plot. The movie has enough trouble figuring out how to get the characters from one fantastical location to the next that Adams's funniest concepts often feel left in the dust. While the reverence the filmmakers felt toward Adams's legacy is apparent, one wonders what we could have expected had the creator of this science fiction universe lived to see it with his own eyes. -- Ryan Boudinot

A Guide to the Guide

The Soundtrack	The Radio Play (CD)	The TV Series
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide (Deluxe Edition)	The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide (Paperback)	The Filming of the Douglas Adams Classic (book)

Interviews with The Cast and Director

Watch our interviews with the cast and director of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and find out what they think of other DVDs and books: high bandwidth low bandwidth

DVD Features
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the book, not the movie, or rather, the book within the--oh, never mind) is ideally suited for DVD adaptation. Navigating menus designed to look like the pages of the Guide itself, viewers can access such choice bits as deleted scenes, scenes designed to look like they were meant to be deleted but are actually little mini-spoofs of the movie, and a short featurette documentary. The animated short about the existence of God is hilarious and it's a shame it didn't make it into the movie. The sing-along-with-the-dolphins sequence is mildly amusing, and only die-hard fans will want to spend much time with "Marvin's hangman game." Spirited commentary by the cast and executive producer (and Douglas Adams's friend) Sean Solle round out the generous grab bag of extras. Perhaps most fun of all is the "Improbability Drive," a menu option that serves up a random sampling from the extras.

From The New Yorker
A bold, not to say foolhardy, attempt to divert the work of Douglas Adams, with its flood of ruminative wit, into a mainstream movie. Martin Freeman stars as Arthur Dent, your basic tetchy Brit, who is dragged along by his un-British-indeed, unhuman-friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) on a trip through some of the more risible highlights of deep space. If you are not familiar with the conceit of the "Hitchhiker" franchise, whose previous incarnations include a radio series, four novels, and a TV show, you should find much to relish in the revelation that other worlds can be just as wearisome and mismanaged as this one. Many gags, ranging from Marvin the suicidal robot (voiced by Alan Rickman) to the Babel fish that you insert into one ear if you wish to understand all languages, survive, yet the film feels frantic and scattershot, and its rush toward a happy ending is wholly alien, as it were, to the wry pessimism of the original. Most of the cast, understandably, have a stranded and bewildered air, with the exception of Bill Nighy; he plays Slartibartfast, a donnish designer of planetary coastlines who once won an award for Norway. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Mostly Hoopy
There's a simple reason this movie has taken so long to make, and it's this: while Douglas Adams' classic The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a hilarious book, it's a rubbish novel.

I mean that in the nicest possible way - it's one of my favourite books, but it's barely a story at all - more a set of dead-eye, deadpan observations on the absurdity of life, and particularly the British way of life, revolving very loosely around a chap in a dressing-gown. While that's great fodder for a comedy read, it's no basis for a coherent, 90 minute motion picture, especially one having the American market in mind.

It's a matter of record that Douglas Adams realised there was no story, but not until it was too late to fix it (about halfway through book two). From that point onwards made several attempts to pull everything back into a single coherent, archetypal story but totally failed, and in the process ruined the remaining three and a half books themselves, none of which are funny, let alone a good story.

A film-maker has a choice, therefore: stick with the material and film something which is not so much a screenplay as an extended, themed version of Saturday Night Live, or do some significant damage to the source material - "zap straight off to its major data banks and reprogram it with a very large axe", if you will - and make a story out of it.

The first option will in equal measure thrill and infuriate the party faithful, but bore the rest of the population; the second will most likely infuriate the party faithful, but at least has a chance with everyone else. Since the Hitch-Hiker's Guide is now twenty years old, there is probably a whole generation who, so far in their lives, have missed it altogether, so you can hardly blame director Garth Jennings for choosing option two.

What instead we should do is take our hats off to him: he's fashioned a great story but preserved surprising amounts of the source; his innovations are sympathetic and in a couple of cases (the point-of-view gun and the face-slapping devices on the Vogsphere) are a match for the original material; the wonderful production design thoroughly captures the loveable Britishness of Adams' story (the Vogons hover somewhere between the schoolmasters of `70s Pink Floyd and the sort of bureaucrats whom you might find behind the desks of some Ministry of Monty Python's devising), and on top of all that he's coaxed some wonderful performances out of the cast. Martin Freeman captures Arthur Dent's everyman perfectly and has real chemistry with Zooey Deschanel's Trillian; John Malkovich, Bill Nighy, Bill Bailey and both the original Arthur Dent and Marvin from the BBC TV series make hilarious cameos, as does the smiling face of the late creator himself, Douglas Adams, as the very last shot of the movie. That was a splendid touch.

The less forgiving purists are bound to gripe about what's missing; but on the whole I'm the more forgiving sort of purist. Perhaps there is something sinister in the conspicuous omission the Babel Fish "proof" for the non-existence of God - was that a Disney-required edit or just my perfectly normal paranoia? - and I was a bit sad my favourite exchange in all of Douglas Adams' writing was omitted (Arthur: "It's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die from asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young." Ford: "Why? What did she say?" Arthur: "I don't know, I didn't listen"), but overall this was an extremely enjoyable, touching experience and I can't think of a better way to have rounded off an otherwise trying Thursday.

Thursdays. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Olly Buxton

Five Star Movie - Three Star Blu-Ray Disc
Having owned the first release of this movie on DVD, when I heard it was coming out on Blu-Ray I had to pick it up; after all, this was the movie that convinced me to pick up Douglas Adams' spectacular written novels (from Hitchhiker's to Dirk Gently) and give them a read. While watching the movie in 1080i was a pleasure, I was rather disappointed to find that many of the special features found on the original disc - including the absolutely brilliant interface with the interactive improbability drive that occasionally took you to an Easter Egg - were stripped out of the Blu-Ray disc. I could have even dealt with the loss of the interface in exchange for the movie showcase menu that allows you to access features, select scenes, and access the setup while the movie is playing, if only they had provided all the content on the original DVD. I've experienced this now on a couple of Blu-Ray discs and I find it quite upsetting (officially entering rant territory), that despite the capacity for Blu-Ray discs to hold 80% more data than a DVD, and 40% more data than a HD disc, that companies are skimping on features and selling the discs at an inflated price. While Blu-Ray may be the superior format, it's not going to gain in market standing by the release of inferior products.

Surprisingly Good
Thankfully, the film remains quite faithful to the spirit of Adams' book. For example, all of the Guide entries are taken verbatim from it. The massive budget results in a great looking movie that properly captures the scope and scale of the story. There is extensive use of CGI to recreate intergalactic space travel and the planet showroom inside of Magrathea (some of the film's most arresting visuals), but this is mixed with old school, reliable rubber costumes for creatures like the Vogons that gives them a texture that you just can't get with computers. This movie is light years ahead of the clunky BBC version which resembled a bad-looking episode of Dr. Who.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy may not have done well in North America because it lacked recognizable A-list movie stars (but then again, neither did the original Star Wars) with decidedly British sense of humour. Sadly, it failed to connect on a mass audience level despite a significant marketing push. Regardless, it is still an entertaining, big, splashy science fiction movie that manages to preserve the wit of Adams' book. So long now and thanks for all the fish.

"Making of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is a fairly standard making of featurette. Not surprisingly, director Garth Jennings said that the key to this movie was in the casting. So, he gathered an eclectic group of actors.

Also included is an "Additional Guide Entry" which faithfully recreates the gag from the book about man proving that God doesn't exist but then it fails to include the book's punchline in which man goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.

There are three deleted scenes that amount to merely extra little bits that include Ford's update entry for Earth as "Mostly harmless."

There are also two "Really Deleted Scenes" that are basically goofy outtakes of the cast hamming it up.

"Sing Along `So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" allows you to sing with the film's catchy Monty Python-esque theme song cum show tune karoake-style.

There is an audio commentary by Jennings, producer Nick Goldsmith and actors Martin Freeman and Bill Nighy. It's a fun, relaxed track as everyone enjoys themselves watching the movie.

Fans of the book will enjoy the additional commentary track with executive producer Robbie Stamp and Douglas Adams colleague Sean Solle. They talk about the movie in relation to Adams' original vision and also speak at length about the differences between the film, the video game, the radio play and the book, justifying the reasons for certain changes. Best of all, Stamp points out the little details that are buried throughout the film in this excellent track.

There is "Marvin's Hangman," that allows you to play a variation of the hangman word game but with Marvin's robot parts.

The extras included on the DVD are done in the style and tone of the movie, including a clever feature known as the "Improbability Drive" that will take you to a completely random moment in one of the extras.