Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

If you've been around mindsay long enough, you know that my hero is Douglas Adams. He was brilliant. Everything he ever did in his short lifetime was worth aquiring and reading, playing, watching, or listening to.  The Hitchhiker's Guide movie is no different, especially for an Adams fanatic. For the fan, there are lots of little references to things in the book that likely seem random to the moviegoer, but not really in a bad way.

If you like the humor that Douglas Adams brings to his books, the movie did the best job possible bringing that humor to the screen. They didn't, however, do all that they could with the material they had. It is a well known fact that Douglas Adams never kept the story the same from its many incarnations. It was a radio show, a book, a TV series, and a video game, and none of them are exactly the same stories. This is why the Douglas Adams fan won't be overly disappointed in the movie. For the non-fan, you can take the pleasure in the fun special effects and witty humor.

Being a fan of the movie before the movie doesn't leave me in a very good position to review the movie, but I can judge the characters and scenes. It had some parts in it that didn't feel right. The casting was alright. At the very least, Arthur was a good cast. Not much on Zaphoid, though. They missed out on an opprotunity to use Genghis Khan and a good joke about where exactly the plans for the demolition were, and they didn't really replace it with a better scene. Objectivly, it may seem to the non-fan that the towel doesn't make sense, why certain things happen in the Heart of Gold, and it is probably harder to grasp the plot points as fast as they happen because it is much like the book except, when you read the book you can take the time to fully disgest the cleverness of the events, whereas you are just along for the ride in the cinema.

Watch the movie twice. I'm sure it only gets better and better. And read the books. At this point in your life there is no good excuse for not having read all of the Hitchhiker's Guide books. You are only hurting yourself.

This movie recieves two and a half thumbs up from my fan side and one and a half from my non-fan side.

Note: My movie scale goes from three thumbs up to three thumbs down. In reality, it is a scale moving from negetive three to positive three, meaning that a mediocre score could, in theory, recieve no thumb at all. In practice, however, I use the no thumb score for movies I haven't really paid attention to, haven't watched, or just don't have much of an opinion on.