The Story in Brief
Arthur Dent's house is about to be demolished to make way for a bypass. This turns out to be the least of his problems: Earth is simultaneously demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and Arthur escapes only because his friend Ford Prefect is an alien researcher for the titular encyclopaedia. What follows is a tour of a universe that is deeply strange, largely indifferent to human concerns, and funnier than it has any right to be. Douglas Adams began the story as a BBC radio series in 1978, adapted it into the novel in 1979, and spent twenty years trying to make it into a film — the 2005 version, directed by Garth Jennings, was released four years after Adams's death. It is a loving, imperfect tribute to material that resists being filmed.
Key Differences
Adams's narrative voice
The novel's comedy is inseparable from Adams's prose style — the deadpan asides, the elaborate digressions, the narrative voice that treats the destruction of Earth with the same mild interest it brings to the question of what to have for lunch. This voice is the joke. The film uses Stephen Fry as the voice of the Guide itself, which is the right instinct, but the jokes that work on the page as prose — the extended footnotes about Vogon poetry, the philosophical asides about the nature of improbability — become something different when they have to be dramatised rather than read.
Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent
Freeman is perhaps the most precisely correct casting decision in literary adaptation history. Arthur Dent is a man defined by mild bewilderment and the stubborn persistence of English ordinariness in the face of cosmic absurdity — Freeman embodies this completely. His Arthur is not the funniest thing in the film but he is the most right thing, the still point around which the universe's chaos revolves.
The Vogons
The Vogons — the bureaucratic alien species responsible for Earth's demolition, and for the worst poetry in the universe — are rendered in the film as magnificent Jim Henson creature-shop creations, physically perfect embodiments of Adams's description. This is one area where the film's visual imagination adds something the prose can only describe. The Vogon sequences are the film at its best.
The added romance plot
The film introduces a more developed romance between Arthur and Trillian — a storyline that does not have the same prominence in the novel and that feels grafted on to provide conventional emotional stakes. Adams's novel is not particularly interested in romance; the film's version of Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) is given more agency and more centrality than the source provides, which works for the film and slightly against the novel's specific flavour of cosmic indifference.
The answer to everything
The revelation that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is forty-two works in the novel because Adams has built up to it through the specific rhythm of his prose — the absurdity of the question machine, the millions of years of waiting, the bathos of the answer. The film delivers the same punchline to a different rhythm and it still works, but the buildup is compressed and the joke is slightly less devastating.
Should You Read First?
Yes — and this is among the most emphatic read-first recommendations on the site, because the prose voice is not just the delivery mechanism for the jokes but the jokes themselves. Read the novel and the film becomes a warm, well-cast companion. Watch the film first and you will enjoy it and miss everything that made readers love the source for forty years.
Adams wrote a novel whose comedy lives entirely in the prose — the asides, the digressions, the narrative voice that is itself the joke. The 2005 film is affectionate, well-cast, and fundamentally loses the mechanism. Read the book. See the film for Martin Freeman, who is Arthur Dent in the way that some actors simply are the character. The novel is the real universe. The film is a pleasant tour of it.