I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yesterday. I can’t say it has an overt environmental theme, but certain parts do inspire a certain nostalgia for the earth. The whole earth, I mean.
You see, at the very beginning of the flick, earth gets destroyed to make way for an intergalactic bypass. Later on, however, our hero runs into one of the guys who helped build it (turns out the entire planet was a supercomputer designed to … oh, nevermind). And the guy has a back-up copy. Yes, of the whole earth.
Anyhoo, this leads to one of the movie’s few real moments of sentiment, as a montage shows trees and fields, crashing waves, blooming flowers, windswept mountains, and damn if it doesn’t make you think, "hey, earth is pretty cool!" That might not seem like much, but for a dedicated urbanite like myself, living in a digital world where images of nature are cheap from overuse, it’s something.
(As for the overall movie … eh. It has a certain charm, but mainly it’s just a busy, frenzied flurry, attempting to squeeze in as much from the books as possible. I’ve read the books probably 10 times each, and I still couldn’t quite tell you what the movie’s plot was, or why it ended when it did. Worth a matinee, I suppose.)
