Monday, February 17, 2020

Sonic the Hedgehog Review




Sonic the Hedgehog is a adventure comedy film based on the Sega video game franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog. The movie is produced by Sega Sammy Group, Original Film, Marza Animation Planet, Blur Studio, and DJ2 Entertainment, and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Sonic the Hedgehog is written by Patrick Casey and Josh Miller and directed by Jeff Fowler.





The story is Sonic has traveled from his world into ours. During his time in our universe he causes a power outage which grabs the attention and the government, who then hire the Dr. Robotnik to hunt him down. Sonic then teams up with a sheriff Tom Wachowski to evade capture and stop Robotnik from using his powers.








Initial Reaction



Now I was fully looking forward to this movie. Especially since recently we've got a lot of good video game movies. 2018's Tomb Raider and Rampage were good and 2019's Pokemon: Detective Pikachu was good. Sure their not going to win any awards or anything but after a long history of bad video game movies it was so refreshing to have not one, not two, but THREE good ones. Then that first trailer came out and my excitement was brought WAY DOWN! I mean really they used Gangster Paradise as the song? And of course Sonic's design.....safe to say that gave people nightmares. Luckily everything changed when the second trailer came out. Talk about an improvement.








Cons



I've got nothing to say. Let's move on.








Middle Ground



The biggest grey area with the movie is the script. Yes, it contains clichès, tropes, and even a bit of product placement BUT I think the audience is willing to forgive that because when you watch the film, it's clearly shown that the writers truly wanted to make a good story. There wasn't a time where it felt like the story was just made by a bunch of corporate suits thinking "Okay, just make any random story and we'll get into theaters regradless of quality". Another mix bag was the CGI. Most of the time it works other times it felt weird. Like during the final battle whenever there's a close up shot of Robotnik in his ship there's something about the effect that just didn't seem right to me.








Pros



Now let's move on to the positives, one of those being the performances mostly from Ben Schwartz and Jim Carrey. I really enjoyed Ben's Sonic voice, it really fit with the character and he definitely nailed Sonic's personality. And of course you have one of the two highlights of the movie is Jim Carrey. From when he's introduced to the ending you can tell he was just having a blast playing Dr. Robotnik. Now this is beating a dead horse but you really need to give the animators credit, the design for Sonic was great. The cartoony look works for the movie, had they used that more realistic design there's no way it would have worked for the film. Especially when you take into consideration that the original design's realism wouldn't have bounced off well with someone like Carrey's animated movements, but with these redesign it works for the overall movie. So big thumbs up for the animators for all of the hard work they put in. The other aspect of Sonic the Hedgehog I enjoyed was the humor. A buddy of mine and me were just having a good laugh through and through with the movie, especially since there was a popular Sonic meme thrown in there. We thought that was brilliant. The final thing I'll give the movie credit for is it's mid-credit scene. I think it was a good sequel hook and I got really excited. And given the movie I saw I wouldn't mind a sequel.








Sonic the Hedgehog is a pretty good video game flick. What with it's performances from Jim Carrey & Been Schwartz, Sonic's design, the humor, and a good mid-credit scene. The more alright aspects are the CGI and the script.








My final rating is Good








So yeah, if you're a fan of Sonic definitely give this movie a watch. I don't really think there's anything that will truly disappoint you. Anyways that's going to do it for me. Come back on Thursday, Feb 20th for my A Look Back at review of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. That review will be in celebration of the seventh and final season of the show. Until then enjoy the rest of your day.

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