Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) movie

Plenty of people in this very thread were saying positive things about the trailer. There's mine:

Turns out it wasn't that bad as a Sonic movie either.

Some people were even more positive:

 

You forgot this:

 

He says it when coming to at the sister's house. So it's more of a comedic line than we saw in the trailer.

 

Don't forget that some of the more endearing references were put in later also, like for instance his map being nothing but obscure classic references.

 

Pretty sure the map was always gonna be there. It was his guide.

 

Even though I stated earlier that this Sonic isn't my ideal version of the character (Another sticking point with me being that he's too attached to one particular place, to the point where he gets mad at Tom for wanting to leave Green Hills for a more exciting life elsewhere, something which I feel especially flies directly in the face of previous depictions), I just remembered that there are in fact elements I actually like about this iteration. Recent portrayals of Sonic in other media were often too laid-back for my tastes, whereas Movie Sonic is always full of energy, moving around and having fun with his super speed, which imo fits a speedster-type character better.

One of my favorite, if not my favorite, parts is in the beginning where he's messing with Tom. I would absolutely love to see that bit of mischievousness incorporated into his main game counterpart.

 

To UK residents like me, who didn't want to be seen funding the Sonic the Hedgehog movie in any way, it's now available for Sky Cinema customers to watch.

So I watched it. I had ignored this topic (and most Sonic movie-related material) since its launch and... there's barely anything in the movie that wasn't in the trailers. So you can save yourself 90-odd minutes by just watching the very start and the very end.


As for the film itself, I found it ugly to look at. Jim Carrey is a thing. The premise is a bit strange. The blue arms don't match the pixel art. It looks like one of those wonky fan movies. There will be worse kids films to watch this Christmas.

Also really want to see the original cut, because it's obvious where the more Sonic-y bits have been shoehorned in. I'm not convinced the writers have played the video games... though the same can be said for pretty much every Sonic film or TV show.


Whatever/10.

 

I don’t guess I gave my thoughts on it in here but I guess to make it short and sweet (EDIT: it wasn’t)..

This movie is everything the 1993 Mario film was for Mario. Extreme liberties in characterization, lore and art direction, elements in its execution borrowed from other films of it’s era (Mario 93 is to Blade Runner and the early 90s dinosaur craze as Sonic 2020 is to superhero films and Alvin/Smurfs/Hop), the random superficial reference or two made in vain attempt to hide that no one making the movie played these games, et cetera.

You can like it if you want. After all, I’m of the rare breed that likes the Mario movie. But I also don’t understand how people got to thinking this was a good video game movie because holy Christ is it bad at being a Sonic film in just about every way imaginable.

I guess people were on the high of Detective Pikachu (and the okayish redesign) when the hype train rolled out? Detective Pikachu is not very good either, but I’ll at least say it’s much more respectful of the source material than whatever this film is.

My least favorite part of this film is maybe Sonic himself, and how his personality was heavily altered from nearly any other canon he’s ever had. Sonic is pretty consistently an adventurer who has a bit of aloofness to him. He always wants to move forward and is rather self-confident in his actions, while movie Sonic is really insecure, is very clingy and all but refuses to by-choice leave the one place he’s ever lived. You can argue that leaves room for character development, but I don’t think that’s the point sadly. The way his dynamic in seeking a brother or parental figure in Tom the Fucking Cop (TM) oddly reflects how Tails acts to Sonic more than anything else, which I find to be a very bizarre rewrite of his character. But hey, whatever works for fitting pretested and preapproved family movie story beats!

Pretty much the worst a Sonic movie could have possibly been. Decent movie if you don’t care about Sonic, but if you don’t then why make a Sonic movie? If the only answer is $$$$ then I feel like that just unmasks the nature of the film itself. Shit sucks lmao.

 

The movie does not take extreme liberties. It picks things up from at an earlier time in the general universe. Sonic having insecurities from being alone and Robotnik being on the edge of evil villain are not liberties. They’re real traits that fit both of their personalities.

I have not seen Pikachu yet but Sonic it is quite faithful to the source material. Even though it keeps things as simple as possible due to being the first one/family movie. Playing the games is not required. They could have played every game and still “messed it up” but they didn’t.

His design is perfect. I actually defended the first design (I still like some of it) but the redo is perfect. It just is. Blue arms never bothered me. Not even in Boom. I don’t even notice them. Either way the rest of him is 99.9% perfect regardless of the movie. Tails too. Also the echidnas. You could just tell.

Sonic is allowed to have a deeper personality. You can be self-confident/adventurous and still want close relationships and a place to call home. These are all natural emotions. Remember he wanted to see everything he could before leaving and it’s why the echidnas caught up to him. Because he was out and about running around Green Hill.

 

It was honestly great to see Sonic being more expressive than a "yeah, cool!"

 

Sonic doesn’t have a deeper personality or motives in the film, he just straight up has different ones. Sonic’s sense of freedom, his world-adventurer qualities and desire to protect captured animals from Eggman isn’t present at all in the film. You can say he hasn’t developed those traits yet, but I feel personally like that’s just excusing them for not getting it right the first time. As if they’d try to do that better next time, heh.

His backstory in the film doesn’t line up with anything that happens in the games whatsoever, unless you subscribe to the early western Sonic bible, which I assume is what inspired this (not a fan of any of that either!). Baby Sonic is some classic Hollywood marketing trend bs, the tragedy angle is dumb as hell, the weird usage of rings is yet another weird obfuscation of game elements turned into a different thing altogether, the photorealistic owl mother lady is ridiculous, echidna tribes are alive in this canon I guess (?) so Knuckles in a movie is gonna get bastardized to hell somehow, Chaos Emeralds are nowhere to be found, and the thing where Sonic has Flash-like electricity powers is some weird superhero movie trait stuff that they configured into the film for some reason. The only thing I found neat was the take on Green Hill Zone, but it also seems like some of that could’ve been premade assets from Marza’s department, considering the similarities to it and its Generations counterpart.

And Sonic’s design is eehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Tyson did what he could to improve it and not have the execs complain TOO hard about obstructing their vision, but the original vision was god-awful so I don’t think that’s saying a lot.

I just feel like people give the Sonic movie a lot of credit because they’re embittered at stories in the games and were quick to say “heh it’s better than anything the games have done”. Which if a weird cross of a CG / live action talking animal movie and a generic superhero flick is better than any concepts the games carried, I’m not sure how many people liked what Sonic had to offer to begin with.

 

In the last decade? You sure you want an answer to that? <_<

The movie deviated A LOT from the gameverse, true.
Movie!Sonic is nowhere close to Game!Sonic, indeed.
ALL of it could've been done WAY better, I can agree.
In comparison with Colors and onwards, plot-wise? I can deem it better, if only a bit.

 

Saying it's a better plot that anything from Colors and onwards is the bottom of the barrel minimum lol. And I’m not really one that thinks that’s a good enough excuse for the departures they took in storytelling.

 

Yeah, I'd rather sit through this film a thousand times before I ever undergo Pontaff torture ever again (Actual torture, not Sonic Forces "oh but he's actually fine" torture). Not saying it's 10/10 4 Thumbs Up amazing or anything, just that it looks that it looked that way compared to what the games are providing. And it gave us something pretty alright. It's the Sonic Colors of Sonic stories in that regard: not especially bad but not incredibly good or memorable either. Idk what people are talking about calling it trash.

 

You can say movie sonic isn't consistent with games etc. but let's not even act like the games themselves are super consistent, it change from game to game basically, somehow the master emerald changed places entirely between Sonic 3 and Adventure, and no one patted an eye , thats just one quick example.

 

You could easily come up with things to explain why an Emerald changed places that doesn't even mean a total rewrite; those kind of things are just "fill in the blanks" kind of instances. Not quite the same as basically everything the film does with it's characters and settings.

If you wanted to do an actually respectful game adaptation (even without sticking 100% to what's established), you could say Sonic's a South Island resident who plays in a band and wants to travel the world with them in a biplane he found. He befriends Eggman (like a Doc Brown & Marty thing), who hasn't proven his true intentions until it's eventually revealed he wants to rule the world and terrorize the animals and animal-people that live on the island, and arrived to the island after finding it's a hotspot for the mythical Chaos Emeralds. Sonic has to save his island friends (maybe Amy is a fangirl of his band?) from Eggman's schemes for total takeover. Once he realizes how much is at stake, he decides to follow Eggman into the sunset, realizing his true calling is to help others, especially since it encourages him to achieve his dreams after-all. And if you want to scratch that itch for backstory, you could probably say the Chaos Emerald chose him to be this hero, hence why he was born with this speed (and later explaining things like the prophecy on Angel Island). Et cetera, et cetera.

What I gave is really simple and takes its own liberties, but it's obviously still trying to take from what the games deliver. And sure, it's not a lot, but it doesn't have to be. This would be a very good simple plot for a character-driven CGI animated film, which is something I think that very well would've fit the franchise unlike what we got.

 

A straight adaptation with only 4-ish characters, extremely low energy, and basically 4/5ths of it filled with dad jokes? I think it'd work more like one of those Disney+ shorts rather than a theatrical blockbuster release but, hey, that's just my opinion and I could be wrong.

 

I get what you mean, but...

A straight adaption would be awesome in my books.

 

I'd love an adaptation of Colors (as I've said before, when it comes to Sonic stories, Colors is The Godfather), but it's too much of a video game story to work as a movie story IMO. Sonic hopping from location to location and fighting big robots is not enough of a plot to carry a movie.

I think the Sonic movie we have is fine as a first installment. It's just that I think the sequel is going to be what the first one should've been (that is, blending the lore from the games into the unique universe of the movie). HOWEVER, it's probably better the way it's going when you consider that the general populace liked this movie, so they're now more likely to tune in for a sequel.