Book Fan

DON'T PANIC, fervent Douglas Adamites. This movie adaptation of the TV adaptation of the novelisation of the radio series is about as faithful as you can get. Yes, it's been tweaked and twizzled, with a romance inserted here, a new character plopped down there, but everything you love about The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy remains intact - not to mention reinvigorated by its big-screen reincarnation.

While Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Luc Besson's The Fifth Element are obvious influences, Jennings consciously avoids turning Adams' idiosyncratic, philosophically tongue-in-cheek cosmos into a slick, CG-caressed megaverse, instead maintaining that view of what's Out There as being pretty much the same as what's Down Here. Only bigger. And infinitely more daft, packed with the kind of alien races that invented underarm deodorant before the wheel, or whose poetry is so bad they use it as a form of torture. Jennings even subverts that sci-fi visual staple, the epic reveal. His Earth-surface-to-outer-orbit pull-back, which unveils the immensity of the planet-trashing Vogon fleet, isn't some portentious, graceful reverse-glide - it's a winking series of jump-cuts. When George Lucas sees that, he'll choke on his pan-galactic gargleblaster.