Good start, but then it gets ruined

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The imagery in this film even caught the attention of my teenage son (briefly), but for someone who fondly remembers the books and BBC TV series it's simply too hard to watch this film without recalling that same TV series. An ideal film would have had Simon Jones as Arthur, David Dixon as Ford, Steven Fry as the narrator, Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian - and a director who had a clue about comic timing, and was prepared to incorporate more material from the book, less new material that was a waste of screen time.Sorry to Martin Freeman, you're a great Bilbo, but you don't capture Jones' alternating mix of acerbic intellectualism and outright panic. Mos Def has none of Dixon's wide-eyed lunacy, and as much as I loved the work of the late Alan Rickman, he really should have watched the TV series as a primer for his voice-over of Marvin. Fry was great, and clearly must have been influenced by the TV series, and I think Rockwell did very well with what was plainly a very different take on Zaphod for the film. More power to him. Bill Nighy was fine, but I miss Richard Vernon's Slartibartfast. The film's visual effects were brilliant, especially the destruction of the Earth and the Magrathean shop floor. Credit too for the truly dingy look of the Vogon constructor ship. Questions: Why does the Guide's animation look so awful in the film? And what was with the Humma Kavula sub-plot? It seemed to go nowhere, almost as if the character were to be reintroduced in a sequel. Less John Malkovich, more one-line comedy from the book, I say. Garth Jennings directed this film without apparently any feel for the comedy of the source material. The lines were delivered too quickly, punchlines were lost. There were just two times I laughed out loud during the film. One was when Ford and Arthur dropped out of the Vogon ship, rather than being blown out. The other was Arthur saving Ford from being run down - and only then because the car Ford was trying to greet was a Ford Prefect. That would have gone right over the heads of most cinema-goers, I'm sure. Of the other new material for the film, the point-of-view gun was a cute idea, but lacking the deadly, mind-warping scope of the total perspective vortex, which seems like a similar idea on a larger scale. I hate that this review sounds like a whinge from someone set in his ways, but I truly believe comedy has been the biggest victim here. Perhaps someone sympathetic will take charge of this story with a reboot in about five or 10 years' time. I have my fingers crossed.

This can draw comparison to the BBC series and the book. If you've seen the series and read the book, you know what I'm talking about. Even you haven't (either or neither), you will still enjoy the movie. It was pretty faithful to the book. It had to cram everything into less than two hours, while the series could draw everything out, which was good and bad in both cases. I liked the "new version" of Marvin, and all the performances were at least decent. I think the only thing I preferred in the original series was the "two heads" of Zaphod. Other than that, I liked both versions about the same. I also think they should have added the "mostly harmless" version of Earth. This wasn't too bad. You might like this if you give it a chance.** 1/2 out of ****

Aesthetically very beautiful; also the comic bits were well performed. However, it did not fail to be abundant of philosophical clichés, shallow humanitarian messages and stereotypical characters. And yes(!), one more film with Zooey Deschanel playing the indie 'oh lets quit our jobs do whatever our guts tell us'girl who ends up with the stereotypical sensitive, nervous, awkward guy.

Of course, this is one of the wittiest books ever written. It is done tongue in cheek with the kinds of absurdities that one would expect from a race of aliens that don't understand us. The election of Donald Trump would be enough to give this verisimilitude. This is not unlike Monty Python in that it is hit and miss and one should take one absurdity and move on to the next. Once again, it is being vilified by people who can't stand it when liberties are taken by script writers and movie producers. The thing is that the fundamental plot is still there. Do we really need another exact version thrown at us? I thought the special effects were great as well as the helter skelter movement of the characters. And where else would one find a depressed robot? What a joy that we have Douglas Adams and such creative minds!