mrbeankc

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been a radio series, book series and a television series and now unfortunately a film. There's no way to sugar coat this. This film is bad. Very bad. It's nothing more than a stripped down version of the TV series script poorly adapted and poorly directed. If you are interested in this story I greatly recommend watching the BBC series done for TV over this version.

It's almost as if you decided to make a Monty Python movie based on some of their TV show skits and then went in and trimmed the dialog down by half. What you have left is almost a reader's digest version and very frustrating. Lines come and go, delivered out of context leaving viewers who aren't familiar with the story left with no idea what is going on in sections.

The fictional documentary film has a long tradition. The most famous of this genre are perhaps the 1984 film This is Spinal Tap and the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project. This is a film that ranks up there with them in this genre.

In this case the film uses real people playing themselves rather than actors playing roles. This include Gabriel Beristain (Cinematographer of such films as Ring Two and Blade Trinity) and Zak Penn (writer of films such as X-Men 3 and Fantastic Four. Penn also directs this film).

The plot of the film is simple. Director Werner Herzog is making a film about the myth of the Loch Ness monster. Meanwhile a documentary crew is making a documentary on Herzog. The film is almost a parody of a previous documentary on Terry Gilliam called Lost In La Mancha done several years ago which chronicled his disastrous attempt to film his movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In this fictional case however the film is hampered by the film's producer Zak Penn who is trying to make a different film than director Werner Herzog.

The film works wonderfully because the actors are not afraid to make fun of themselves, especially Zak Penn who actually directed the film along with writing it. It's his obnoxious demeanor that really steals the show along with Herzog's general calming effect on the whole affair.

This movie is the worst. Gus Grissom was one of the greatest astronauts we had. Respected by everyone at Nasa. He was so highly respected that Nasa picked him among all the other astronauts to command both the first Gemini and first Apollo missions. Several people who were high up in management at Nasa during Apollo even admit that had he lived, Gus Grissom would have been the first man to step on the moon. Even his fellow astronauts when asked to give a peer review of their fellow astronauts ranked Grissom #1. Yet in this film he is shown to be a screw up and coward. Anyone who knows anything about the space program during the 60s can see how poor and extremely inaccurate this film is.