2005's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy was such a missed opportunity

I caught the movie on Netflix last week for the first time in a while. Its a film with some undeniably great moments and a few rock solid performances, and the source material shines as brightly as ever, but its just not as good as it should have been.

Alan Rickman/Warwick Davis as Marvin? Superb.

Stephen Fry as the Narrator? Ingenious.

Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent? Couldn't be better.

Mos Def as Ford Prefect? B minus. Could have been better.

Sam Rovkwell as Zaphod? Not bad but why the George Bush-by-way-of-Jim Carrey schtick?

Zoe Deschanel as Trillian? Jesus why?

It sucks that they shoehorned a manic pixie dream girl subplot into this film. Zoe is in no way believable as Trillian, she commits to almost no lines and her arc centers around some doughy claptrap about how only Arthur understands her, even though their sole interaction was meeting at a party. It really is one of the worst examples I can think of of forced romantic subplotsand it sucks that they spent so many amazing actors working at their peak on this film that alllmost works but not quite.

Has it been long enough that we can get Edgar Wright to remake this with some of his regulars? Pegg and Frost seem natural fits for the leads (either could play either role, I feel) or he could grab some of his other talent to avoid it feeling like a fourth Cornetto film. The material requires a frenetic pacing that the 2005 film simply can't capture, the leads need to be bounced from scene to scene so quickly they can barely keep up. Not to mention Wright's mastery of "blink and you'll miss it" visual gags would add plenty of new flavor to some written jokes we're all a bit too familiar with at this point. Just imagine how many ways he could cleverly hide "42" in the background of every shot.

In a better world, huh?

Submitted September 19, 2018 at 09:29PM by Wazula42 https://ift.tt/2DbUgQI