Design and the Guide

Mon, Dec 12, 2005

Last night, taking a break from grading a set of papers on utopia, progress, and technology, I stopped to watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I remember some bad-sounding buzz about this on the internets, and went in expecting to be disappointed. I wasn’t, though. Tim seems to resemble Douglas Adams quite a bit, and I always pictured Arthur Dent as looking like his jacket photo. Versatile Sam Rockwell’s presidential impersonation was not, as the Village Voice review reminds us, terribly subversive; but I found it amusing nontheless. I’d would have liked a nod at the Babel Fish puzzle from the Infocom game, myself, and Marvin should have been clunkier.

The animations of the guide itself, however, were great. I especially enjoyed the vignette about the physicists downstairs.