Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) movie

You can't spell live-action Sonic without real-life hedgehog. Hence blue arms.



Being a creative often means applying the rules (keyword: creativity 101). Once your thoughts start circling around press and sales you're most likely to lose sight of the goal.

 

A large amount of people said the same thing about Detective Pikachu, and that movie was received relatively well. The movie isn't out yet. We've seen like two minutes of footage. We don't know if it's going to be garbage.

 

But Detective Pikachu had good trailers. This movie had one trailer, and it sucked ass.
I dunno, seems fair to me to judge the movie based on what we've been given.

 

Are his eyes green or black? I can't really tell from that picture.

 

To be fair, detactive pikatchu did have a trailer that was received extremely well before the movie, can't say the same about sonic even ignoring the design.
i say that as someone who will watch the movie only for jim carrey, not expecting the best but not expecting some dumpster fire either, something in the middle like most pixar movies anyway , it can still be mindless fun with the right mindset

 

In my case, Detective Pikachu trailers seemed like a safe bet right from the start.
Unlike Sonic Movie, so far...

 

Yup. I've seen a lot of people on Twitter seeing "we should go and see the movie to reward the filmmakers for listening to the fans". as if everything is suddenly all amazing now.
Because that's a really bad idea if that's the kind of mentality to give to movie studios.

1) Tease something absolutely horrific so that people will obviously complain online
2) Say "We've listened" and make changes to make the horrific thing slightly less horrific
3) Everyone cheers. "We did it!" The fans think they've won, without paying attention to the real core issues.

Kinda reminded of attitude towards Netflix Death Note when it was in production... so many fans up in arms about whether characters like L were played by an asian actor. I felt like everyone was ignoring the bigger issue of "This whole thing looks like a Dumpster Fire and we shouldn't even be paying attention to it". Changing an actor or some surface level trait isn't always the magic fix fans think it will be a lot of the time.

 

Even the design have been fixed nothing will fix the film itself....
Seeing from the trailer past months ago, it just looks broken... all over the place.

 

On this subject, the whole "nature vs machine" thing never really occurred to me while playing the first 3 games, was this always supposed to be a thing or did they made it up later to give themselves some environmentalist street cred? The only time I can remember it being acknowledged was by Aaron Webber in a prerelease Forces stream .
In any case, it doesn't feel like it's a defining factor of the series to me, and I don't expect it to end up in the movie.

 

They were never trying to send a message, if that's what you mean. They just used it as visual shorthand for who was good and who was bad.

 

Ah, gotcha.
In that case though, I'd argue it would be difficult to even put this aesthetic in a live action movie without it looking like some weird Avatar ripoff. Or maybe I'm overthinking things.

 

How about one of the Admins move the "nature vs. machine/technology" posts into a separate thread? They don't have much to do with the film itself.

But like what Dark Sonic said: at the very least, the less mockably memeable Sonic looks, the better for all of us; we don't want this film to add any more fuel to the fire, it's bad enough as it is.

 

A product that's merely aggressively mediocre would be a nice change of pace.

 

I think the first time that message ever appeared in any Sonic media was the SatAM series, and even then it was really subtle. Then again, Sonic and the Freedom Fighters used tech too, but then AGAIN they didn't try to dominate with it or prioritize it over nature like Robotnik did.

Liking the new design. It's not perfect but it's much less nightmare inducing.

 

We already had that with Forces tho, or Lost World

 

Sonic as been steeped in the aggressively mediocre category for a little while now, outside of Mania and RoL being opposite extremes. TSR, Forces, Sonic 4 Episodes 1 & 2, Lost World and the two Boom 3DS games are underwhelming games without being utter dumpster fires like '06, Shadow and RoL. In hindsight, I wonder if Colours and Generations would now be perceived more as "alright" games instead of great ones; although they were leaps and bounds ahead of the series' low points, they still short, limited games that never really excelled at anything in particular. Especially when you look at the Classic half of Generations and realise that Mania trounces it from every angle. I always remember thinking of Colours as "the worst good Sonic game" back when I first played it in 2010, and that kind of sentiment seems to have become more apparent as people call the game a bit dull or boring these days.

I guess it's not all the dissimilar to the film. First of all, we had '06/the original trailer, which was infamously derided for being utterly terrible. Then everything was taken back to the drawing board and we got Colours/the new movie Sonic design, in which the most egregious problems were addressed and people rejoiced as those everything was right with the world. But then, if you look at it through the lens of "what if they didn't make '06/the original movie design in the first place", you can focus more on the issues that are still present.

That's my take on it at least. You might feel differently if you're not as down on Colours and Generations as I am. But the point about Sonic being mediocre for a while still kind of stands. '06 is famously bad. Nobody forgets about shit that awful unless it happens repeatedly, which is why people forget about RoL in when talking about the worst Sonic games. '06 was a famous disaster, which has some benefits. At least the movie has managed to create some buzz from being so offensive to viewers' eyes to begin with, which is might be able to bounce back from. That the design was so swiftly fixed after being so wrong in the first place might lead to an aggressively mediocre film that gets more good press than it would have done if it had always looked as it does now.

We'll see how it pans out, I guess. I'm not going to entertain the conspiracy that the movie intentionally had a bad Sonic design to begin with though, with the plan being to capitalise on "fixing" the design. That's bollocks.

 

I completely agree.

A stunt like that could have maybe been a plausible theory if the original design was only created in limited quantity and controlled to not spread to multiple types of media. Except, that wasn't the case at all. Besides the movie/trailer, there were various different highly detailed promotional art of the design made in a variety of poses, numerous advertising posters and stands worked on and printed, then delivered to different cinemas, and a batch of merchandise crafted around the design. That's a stupid amount of time and money to waste, and a ridiculous amount of distributors/employers/workers to piss off/inconvenience all for the sake of a deliberate fuck-up and planned P.R. turnaround.

I frankly do not buy that the redesign and movie delay were planned from the get-go, there's simply too much financial loss and fucking-around-people involved, that such a stunt I can only see being pulled by the most dickish and dense of very high level employers in some sort of top management control roles, who are so rich and 'untouchable' that they would do all of this for fake "we're listening" press and whatnot. I understand that sometimes people in power do outrageous things, but unless solid proof emerges that this design fuck-up and backlash response was 100% intentional, I wont blindly believe it.

 

I think the likeliest reason for the design (and admittedly I have no basis for this, it's purely speculation) is simply some executive at Paramount insisted on it, and was too high up and insulated to have their decision question or contradicted.

In fact I wouldn't be surprised if every VFX artist down the chain who worked on Sonic knew full well just how awful the design was. It's not just that it's different from the original Sega design, it's just extremely unpleasant to look at in its own right.