FILM REVIEW: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Mostly Harmless, Often Quite Funny.

Science fiction isn't generally known for its comedy. Though a few successful attempts have been made – Men In Black and Ghostbusters come to mind – it’s generally a genre devoted to geeky, self-serious stock characters. The grim sardonicism of the rugged, B-picture military types that inhabit sci-fi action thrillers is about the closest most futuristic movies come to laughs.

This is unfortunate, because the bizarre, spaceship-and-alien-filled worlds that science fiction generates are ripe for comedy. Thus, when a science fiction comedy that gets it even mostly right comes along, it's a cause for celebration, or at least some warm gestures of appreciation. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in its book form, was inspired surrealist-satirical lunacy. The film, while slightly less successful, mixes the two genres quite nicely, blending goofy American slapstick with absurd, awkward British shtick andgently shaping it into the form of a big-budget summer blockbuster. While it may not be slavishly accurate to its beloved source books, it is a remarkably genial film that more than makes up for its meandering plotlines with sheer likability.

The story begins with the Vogons' demolition of Earth for an intergalactic superhighway, a stab at the brutish, inhuman carelessness of public works and large bureaucracies. The Vogons are the film's chief nasties, obsessive paper pushers who pine over forms and signatures. Theirs is a world of grouchiness and regulation, and the film uses their incomprehensible poetry to knock the creative pretensions of bureaucracy.

But Hitchhiker doesn't just criticize the stodgy, mind-numbing "artistry" of the paper-pushing class; it also celebrates the joy of thoughtful creation, both literally and stylistically. Literally, it finds its resolution in a factory devoted to the creation of planets. Science fiction authors have long extolled the joys of creating new worlds, and Adams' story took this idea and ran, finding a deep satisfaction in both the grandeur and minutiae of invention. Stylistically, the film itself is carefully realized world, and there is certainly joy to be found in its creations: the Vogons, the wacky, bulbous spaceship The Heart of Gold and John Malkovich as Humma Kavula, walking across a table on dozens of metallic, golden tentacles. The Vogons, especially, are a treat. The filmmaker's rather than succombing to the temptations of CGI, coaxed some wonderful work out of Jim Henson's creature shop. These, wrinkled, suit-wearing curmudgeons are a reminder of how much more solid practical effects feel in comparison with their computer-generated counterparts. Even the opening explosion is more about what's happening than the spectacle of special effects wankery; this is a rare blockbuster impresses with something other than technical prowess.

It says much about the movie's tone that its opening planet-annihilation is viewed primarily as disconcerting and slightly annoying, and this mostly because it's an impediment to a good cup of tea. Despite its American gloss, there is a distinctly dry, British undertone to the production, most notably in its protagonist, the hapless, reserved Brit Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman).

Dent, like nearly all of the characters, is disarmingly sweet. Thrust into a series of unrelentingly wacky situations, he displays a harried agitation with the general state of his existence. Freeman plays up Dent's frustrations, giving him a flustered, nebbish persona that's keenly aware of the way life's subtle cruelties always seem to best him. Allowing Dent to display genuine weakness makes him a refreshing counterpart to the unending string of blustery action heroes that usually populate event pictures such as this one. The result is that, in Dent's inevitable moment of final resolve, he's a believably changed person overcoming a real struggle, not a sleek-boned model being polishing a minor flaw.

While Dent is the best drawn of the leads, the other characters are similarly fun to watch. Dent's insecurities are balanced out by the half-baked (or possibly just very baked) antics of Ford Prefect (the always brilliant Mos Def), playing a vigorously out-there space hitchhiker. Prefect is the film's most consistently funny character, and Mos Def's timing is imbued with a quirky, shifty rhythm, as if Prefect is living in a world that's just slightly removed from the one everyone else experiences.

Zooey Deschanel plays Dent's love interest, Trillian, and while she doesn't have much to do, she gives every moment an unexpected combination of naïve girlishness and resolute femininity. Even without much in the way of depth, Deschanel makes Trillian tremendously appealing, and it's immediately clear why Dent is smitten with her: so is everyone in the audience.

The film retains the book's secular humanist bent, but tempers it with an all-encompassing, goofy sweetness. Douglas Adams was, like so many science fiction authors, an aggressive humanist, and his books took regular potshots at typical humanist targets like religion and spiritual pseudo-science, as well as more generalized targets of annoyance like slow-moving bureaucracy and stupid politicians. Even the business of world creation is an inherently humanist notion, suggesting that humans must find happiness in making the world around them. The aforementioned parodies can still be found in the suit-wearing Vogons or the religious-political order devoted to sneeze worship, but the film doesn't belabor its commentary. Zaphod Breeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), who plays the President of the galaxy as a swaggering, thieving idiot, is clearly intended to ape the current President, but he’s primarily an obnoxious buffoon, not a political caricature. These satirical darts come with a plastic tip – they're far more playful than pointed.

Playful, in fact, is probably the single best word that can be used to describe the film. Filmed with an acute sense of abstract visual nonsense, it's most successful when transferring Adams' stranger descriptions into ridiculous sight gags. The improbability drive, which causes highly improbable events to occur in increasingly hilarious fashion, and the titular Guide itself, an animated document narrated with sublime dryness by Stephen Fry, allow the film to retain the book's narrative digressions. Director Garth Jennings moves between bits on a missile that turns into a whale and the escape of all dolphins from Earth with smooth assurance, and almost manages to succeed in weaving it all together into a single, cohesive narrative.

Almost, but not quite; the film's major weakness lies in its lack of dramatic focus. The aimless narrative never congeals around a single conflict; it can't decide whether it wants to be about the Dent-Trillian love story, the search for a nifty but ultimately irrelevant gun, or possibly, the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything (which astute readers will already know is 42 - when in doubt, trust Google). Despite, or perhaps as a result of, tossing about all these plotlines, the film never defines a central dramatic arc. By default - or at least blockbuster tradition - the finale revolves around a Vogon showdown, and the ending sequence loses some of the film's earlier energy, drifting off into space like a discarded satellite.

Still, the film is tremendously agreeable for the majority of its running time, successfully transferring much of Adams' rambling, wacky, satirical style into something that also approximates all the necessities for a major Hollywood production. This may sound impossible, but in Adams' world, it's just highly improbable.