Resumo de The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

In a mild night of 1995?s fall some noise from stones being thrown upon my window interrupts my sleep. I could barely see who was talking enthusiastically about travelling and getting to know different lifestyles underneath my window at four o?clock in the morning. ?We just have to abolish the money??, I did not want to here more of my friend Mark?s version of Huxley?s brave new world.

So I shut the window and went back to sleep. Then, a few days later, a newspaper article of the German ?Bildzeitung? confirmed what I had already heard from others. The other night Mark had driven crazily on the motorway, throwing empty bottles on his persecutors, the police. He crashed into the guardrail, flying through the already broken windshield to land on his feet. When I visited him later he used to tell me that he had read The Hitchhiker and than went mad. Additionally to his torn ligaments my friend developed a schizoaffective psychosis.

And he would always talk about the Emperor of the universe, and Marvin, Ford, and Arthur.

Athough Adams does not necessarily lead to psychosis, one thing remains true about his first volume of the hitchhiker-trilogy: From the very first page on we have to question our Weltbild in terms of coincidence, space, time, dualistic types of logic, or whales and their natural habitat. Adams trivializes grand theories using them as a background thread for its humoristic story weaving. He balances between sharp sense and ridiculousness without pushing Einstein, Nash, and Russel down the edge to the dump of kitsch. In the shoes of earthling Arthur Dent we see how the world is destroyed, discover that our best friend is an alien, meet someone attractive that we once met at a party in a two-headed alien?s spaceship, fly to an enormous planet that is supposed to have constructed the earth to finally realize that the earth?s population was controlled by mice. Arthur, as he appears too naïve confronted with his cynic environment, is the primary component of Adams grotesque humour.

This thin story line is filled up with improbable action. Adams dominates the coincidence. In only 45 minutes The Hitchhiker in its original form as a BBC recording had to convince the audience quickly. Of course, the book reflects this quantity of action; but unfortunately, the motion picture version does not. Here we are forced to see prolonged music scenes at the beginning that anticipate the later volumes of the series. We have to see Ford?s giant ex girlfriend, John Malkowitsch in an admittedly visually convincing role, and see Mr Adams? English art substituted by the typical ?face-slamming? scenarios of Hollywood. In all, the script would have been better off without the added sequences that do not appear in the book.

Emotion laden robots or upset doors were not commonplaces in the late seventies when The Hitchhiker appeared firstly. And still, not only a core group of cultish fans, but also schedules of school courses expressed a profound reading interest in Douglas Adams over the years. But it was not until a medial context for a broader understanding of his work was constructed that The Hitchhiker was considered worth a Hollywood production. Anyway, whereas Matrix and Dark City, for instance, could animate a climate where The Hitchhiker could flourish, movies like Lord of the Rings are very unlikely to provoke a similar motivation to visualize Adam?s shade, Terry Pratchert, on the big screen.

And although we are not sure why, at the end of the first Hitchhiker we at least won?t leave our towel at home while travelling.

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