LONDON - "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", a quirky tale of space travel that went from radio series to best-selling book to hit TV show, has now morphed into a film that looks set to divide its faithful followers. Creator Douglas Adams had long wanted to turn his cult sci-fi comedy into a feature film, and was working on a script when he died of a heart attack in 2001 aged 49.
Four years on and his dream has finally come true after the film, made by Walt Disney Co.'s Touchstone Pictures, received its world premiere in London late on Wednesday ahead of its general release at the end of April. Its backers will hope that despite the story's quintessentially British humour, the movie will replicate the international success of the five-book "trilogy" Adams wrote that has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.
The story follows the travels of diffident Englishman Arthur Dent, who catches a lift on a spaceship in time to avoid being obliterated with the rest of the Earth by Vogons building an interstellar highway.
Already there is grumbling among Hitchhiker fans that the film has sold the original concept short, failing to capture the absurd nature of the plot and inserting material that never appeared in the original. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad," wrote M.J. Simpson, self-styled top expert on the stories who announced on his Web site that he would cease commentating on Hitchhiker's after May 6, the movie's original release date. "This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep."
Others, though, have jumped to its defence. The cast were careful to stress that they had kept close to Adams' script.
Interpretations of the story vary. Some see it as silly and meaningless, while others believe its message is the powerlessness of humans to shape their lives. The
book describes the Earth as "an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."
Reuters
