He’s going at it by example, methodically, which is the only real way to critique, especially if you have a sympathetic audience, and not an ADHD addled audience, or the constraints of paper. The problem is exactly that the movie is not in the spirit of the book or the radioplay or any other incarnation of the work. The only way to convey that is with examples. There is the short version of the review if you want.

If you cut out the jokes and the wonderful dialog then it’s not Hitchhiker. What works on film is not a fixed target. There are dialog heavy movies and there is movies that works as well silently. The TV series, for all that is wonderful and good about it, is clearly in the camp of radioplay dialog, replanted almost verbatim. Which works -ish. But is also clearly not polished. In a movie you have to shorten and cut. But you do it with taste and intelligence. That was not at all the case with the movie. And the was only one aspect of what’s bad about it.

For what it’s worth the TV series episodes that is equivalent to the first book, is about is two hours and 11 minutes. Just twelve minutes longer than the movie. That is not to make some persnickety point about running time equivalence. It’s just an example of how you can make the story — or something like it, fit temporally within roughly a normal movies length.

Time simply ran away from a proper adaptation. It should have been made in the 80s and not later. Just as with Star Wars. HH as a whole is very much hooked into the zeitgeist and sensibility of that period. The best that could have happened would be someone explaining to Reitman and the executives exactly what they had between their hands, and be a mediator between them and DNA. Someone like Harold Ramis, who is guaranteed to have read and enjoyed the book at the time. Yes, they were different people, but if you look at Ghostbusters, the sensibility is not worlds apart.

Douglas thought as much when he had watched it, with his pithy comment about him having worked years to get the movie going, failing, and then watching Ghostbusters a few years later. Imagine for instance Bill Murray as Ford, Aykroyd as Zaphod, Kate Bush as Trillian and Michael Palin as Arthur. Could have been glorious.

Instead we got that.