The movie’s a couple years old, but it was brought up again, and it seems I have a couple things to say about it.

It was amazing to see how the filmmakers completely missed the mark with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” movie.  They’d take a funny or witty quote from the book and then have the actor say the same quote, but leave out the funny or witty part.  Over and over again.  Amazing.

If, by pure chance, a funny line did make it through unadulterated, they’d then add in a line which attempted to explain the joke (which never needed explaining in the first place) and utterly kill the humor.  I should record a podcast commentary for this movie pointing out everything that’s wrong with it.

There was one good new joke in it, however.  “Achoo.”  That was it.

One good joke can’t make up for the bewildering “creative” choices that composed the rest of the movie.  For every spot-on choice, such as casting Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, we get something which completely undercuts it, such as having a Zaphod with only one head.  Okay, so the movie suggested something about Zaphod’s second, hidden head being the place where he stored some deep dark governmental secret.  This is a plot point which has its genesis in the original radio drama and that secret would seem to be the reason behind everything that happens, from Zaphod’s theft of the infinite improbability drive starship to the destruction of the Earth.  But what happens with this strand of the story in the movie?  Oh, yes.  The movie decides not to address or resolve it in any fashion and simply ends.

This ending is the final insult.  As they fly off to take in a bite to eat at the restaurant at the end of the universe, Marvin informs everyone that the restaurant is at the other end of the universe, so the ship makes a dramatic U-turn.  Roll credits.  Sorry, what?  Even the most casual fan of the books (or TV series or radio program) knows that the “end of the universe” at which this restaurant is found is not an end in space, but in time.  In what conceivable way does this joke work?  Does it matter if you’re facing left or right when traveling in time?

I won’t stoop to hyperbole and say that this is the worst movie ever made, but I will quote Roger Ebert: “I hated, hated, hated this movie.”