Thumbs up for Hitchhiker

Yesterday I took the boys to see the long-awaited movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. We went to the first screening at The Embassy, part of a rather small audience which perhaps doesn't bode well for its box office potential.

One student-type was wearing pyjamas and carrying a towel, which reminded me (old codger alert!) of a fancy-dress party we had at Radio Active in, oh god, 1982 - when the first release of the TV series spawned such goings on.

I must confess that since those heady days I haven't had much exposure to the Guide. Yes, I had read all the books, listened to the radio show, watched the (at the time rather disappointing) TV version etc, but apart from playing the text-based computer game in the early 90s I haven't given Douglas Adams' opus much thought in recent years.

So I didn't go into the movie with much of a critical hat on, though I was interested in how the kids would react to it.

And hey, we all had a good time. The dolphin song and Marvin the Paranoid Android went down well with the boys, and I enjoyed being re-acquainted with the mostly intact pythonesque humour of the original.

As a film, it certainly had its flaws. The Brits - Martin Freeman and Bill Nighy along with the voice-over presence of Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry - were perfect. But the other casting decisions seemed a bit strange. Why choose obscure american actors to play Zaphod and Trillian? And who or what exactly is Mos-Def?

The movie also lost a lot of its pace during the Magrathea sequence, with an inconsequential cameo by John Malkovich.

But there were plenty of highlights - like Bill Bailey doing the voice of the improbable sperm whale, and the many Guide excerpts.

Look forward to the DVD.