It's been a radio series, a book, a computer game and a TV series. Now Douglas Adams enormously popular sci-fi comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a movie.

Londoner, Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman, who played Tim in TV's The Office) is having a very bad if not downright strange day. His house is about to be bulldozed, he discovers his best friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is actually an alien from the planet, Betelgeuse as well as a writer for the aforementioned Guide and Earth is about to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic expressway! News of Arthur's soon-to-be bulldozed home pales in comparison with that last piece of information.

Saved by his friend before the world explodes, Arthur hitches a ride on a passing spacecraft and sets out on a journey across the galaxy in which nothing is what it seems. Among those he encounters are the President of the Galaxy, the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell); Slartibartfast (Bill Nighy); Trillian (Zooey Deschanel); Marvin the Paranoid Android (Warwick Davis and the voice of Alan Rickman), Questular Rontock (Anna Chancellor) and a religious cult leader named Humma Kavula (John Malkovich) created especially for the movie.

Arthur learns that a towel is the most useful thing in the universe, finds the meaning of life and discovers that everything he needs to know can be found in one book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.