Don't Panic

Slashdot had an article which scared me, Hitchhiker's Movie is Bad, says Adams Biographer. I RTFA (the non-spoiling one anyway), and it sounded pretty compelling: my worst fears about this movie are true. It's the hatchet-job Adams was always afraid it would be.

Oh well, if one of LOTR or HHGTTG had to be ruined on film, I guess I'd choose the latter. :-(

But wait! Reading the rest of the Slashdot comments, there were other opinions by people who'd previewed the movie, people with similarly high levels of credibility (former co-workers of Adams at The Digital Village).

One guy says,

Today I saw the movie for the second time, and once again I find myself coming to the conclusion that I must have been shown a different movie to the one that MJ Simpson saw. Having twice been in a cinema full of people who were laughing all the way through at the movie (and these are British people, for crying out loud!), and then reading that the movie is "staggeringly unfunny" leaves me somewhat confused. Partly because I heard all those people laughing myself with my own ears, but mainly because I loved the film.

And another guy says,

Personally, I loved it to bits. It's not perfect, certainly, and I agree with a couple of his criticisms (though with about 5% of his severity). But I fundamentally feel that it's true to the spirit of Hitchhiker's in so many ways, not just through the storyline and script (which is far, far better than MJ would have you believe) but also through visuals and design that are utter genius [emphasis the author's].

And a fan club guy who says, "there are one or two details that I thought did not come across or should have been reconsidered in the movie, and that's a bit sad," but also, "Did I like it? Yes I did, very much. Did I laugh? Oh, yes indeed I did. Very much so."

Last is someone else who says simply, "I loved it."

Meanwhile the first trailers and commercials I'd seen were showing a sci-fi adventure rather than a comedy. And that seems backward to me; it's a comedy first, which just happens to be set in a crazy sci-fi, time-travelling universe. But then, poking around the Apple movie trailer site, I found a more recent (and much funnier) trailer... So, we'll see what we see, come April 29.