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Here’s the absolutely hysterical, wonderfully wild, cosmic adventure comedy THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. Based on Douglas Adams’ worldwide best-selling novel, and starring an outrageous intergalactic cast, this is one ride you don’t want to miss. Seconds before Earth is destroyed to make way for a new hyperspace express route, mild-mannered Arthur Dent is whisked into space by his best friend (an alien posing as an out-of-work actor). And so the misadventures begin as he and fellow travelers, including the cool but dim-witted President of the Galaxy, the Earth girl Trillian, and Marvin the paranoid android, search for answers to the mystery of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Actors Sam Rockwell Mos Def Zooey Deschanel Martin Freeman Bill Nighy Warwick Davis Anna Chancellor Alan Rickman Helen Mirren Stephen Fry John Malkovich Director Garth Jennings Producers Gary Barber Roger Birnbaum Nick Goldsmith Jay Roach Jonathan Glickman Writers Douglas Adams Karey Kirkpatrick Genres Action & adventure Comedy Science fiction Support YouTube Help Center
Source: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
About the Movie
Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), an ordinary Englishman in a bathrobe, is having the worst Thursday of his life: his house is about to be demolished for a bypass. His friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) arrives with worse news — the entire Earth is about to be demolished for a hyperspace bypass, because Ford is not from Guildford at all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and he has been researching for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the most useful book in the universe.
Hitching a ride on the Vogon demolition fleet gets them promptly thrown out of an airlock, rescued by Ford’s semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox, the fugitive President of the Galaxy, aboard the stolen Heart of Gold — a ship powered by an Infinite Improbability Drive, accompanied by Trillian, the only other human survivor, and Marvin, a robot with a brain the size of a planet and a thoroughly justified depression. Their destination: the legendary planet Magrathea, and the answer to life, the universe, and everything — which turns out to be 42, and not the hard part.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s is one of the very few comedy works that permanently changed science fiction’s vocabulary — 42, towels, “Don’t Panic,” and the Babel fish are now part of the culture far beyond the genre. Beginning as a 1978 radio series and growing into novels, a TV series, and this 2005 film (completed from Adams’ own screenplay drafts after his death), it proved that sci-fi could be simultaneously philosophical and profoundly silly, and that the universe’s vast indifference is funnier, and truer, than any conspiracy. The film preserved Adams’ voice — narrated Guide entries and all — for a new generation, which is exactly what the book would have wanted printed, in large, friendly letters.
