It's a tad hard to put my feelings about this version of the source material seeing as how I heard the radio play, read the books, saw the amazingly great mini-series, and even played the delightful text-based adventure game on my now ancient, then new computer. It's somewhat difficult to divorce my self from all of the aforementioned incarnations and just enjoy this film for what it was. Not to say that it was anything horrid, far from it. Some aspects of the adaption were pretty good. Martin Freeman (who was great in "The Office) made an enjoyable Arthur Dent, Mos Def came off far better than I would have even thought as Ford. Those are two things of the top of my head. I'm sure if I were hard pressed I could think of other aspects I enjoyed, it's just that all in all the movie fails sadly. It goes off on tangents trying to capture more of the books than can be fathomed in a film of 109 minutes and throws in it's own sub-plots that I wasn't quite fond of. My humble opinion ultimately would be to stick with the early 80's mini-series as that will likely be the definitive adaption that we'll likely see on either the big or small screen.

My Grade: C+

This movie makes no sense. Or maybe you have to read the book to understand what's happening, because the movie doesn't give any explanation. The movie starts off very promisingly with a great musical number sung by dolphins leaving the planet. It's a catchy and fun number, and I was hoping that fun and excitement would stick through the rest of the film....it didn't. After about 20 minutes, the movie became so muddled in plot and confusing. The movie was very good at dishing out interesting characters with interesting special effects and puppetry, and it had some good looking sets, but the writing explained none of this and I'm sure all the audience who hadn't read the books was scratching their heads. In the end this was a good looking film with nonsensical goings on.

My rating: * 1/2 out of ****.

I grew up with the '80s TV series and have read the book so I've got some background on this. This Hollywood version stands as an absolute travesty and one of the worst-ever novel adaptations I've seen. Gone is the subtlety and distinctive British humour, replaced by heavy-handed farce and an overwhelm of American actors mugging for the camera. The problems are endless and there are no good things. What's with Rockwell's awful CGI second head, could they not afford to do it traditionally with CGI? Why lighten the timbre of Rickman's distinctive voice for no real reason? Why is Martin Freeman so unappealing given how sympathetic he was in THE OFFICE? And what's with the made up characters and love interest? Ugh!