The interesting thing about video game movies is that unlicensed movies seem to know more about their sources than their official partners. Take a look at Tron in 1982 or Wreck-it Ralph in 2012 (all Disney's due props, both of which were made): The appeal of these two photos is to invite them into the screen and live in strange and wonderful Video game world. The visual effects are surreal and spectacular, while the weird, arduous and arbitrary rule-making friction between conventional film narratives and video games has brought ample gags and tension. (It turns out dissonance can be Fun When experiencing from the other end of the huge narrative divide. )
This is a great formula, especially if you are making a retro game movie without a story. But the producer of the new "Sonic the Hedgehog" movie puts everything ahead. Instead of inviting us into the world of Sonic, they brought Sonic into our world-with impressive results.
You can get a brief overview of what happened at the beginning of the movie-after the stars of the Paramount logo were replaced by clinking Sonic rings, and before the first line of a few lines of leaded products was placed in the conversation, this promoted the Development chain. During the hurried setup process, we briefly returned to Sonic's hometown, both dimensional and otherwise. (This movie is reasonable enough and not so keen on science, and ultimately decided to call Sonic the "alien hedgehog.") All checkerboards have interlocking green mountains, the glory of Sega Blue, and a baby Sonic Magnifying it, reveling in his speed. We knew this before getting notified by Sonic, who was told that Sonic's brutal power had caught the attention of the vicious party and condemned his life. A clever owl handed him a sack of gold rings to use as a multidimensional portal, and used it to conceive the portal to the sleepy, remote, wooded town of Greenhills, Montana: this will be Sonic's new home .
(The ring pouch does indeed play the role of MacGuffin in the film, but I regret to tell you that the rings were not scattered at all, so Sonic had to pick them up everywhere.)
Sonic grew into an active teenage hermit, retreating in the woods, lovingly monitoring the town's residents, and collecting some peculiar utensils of the 90's for his study (suspender, Flash comics, dim Night light). Of course, he is a brave and prosperous character. Compared with his cooler finger incarnation in games and cartoons, he is full of his own spirit, but his eyes are broad and self-sufficient. In the end, though, his joie-de-vivre was exhausted from loneliness, and his pre-pubertal mood surged, manifesting as a huge EMP pulse. The government noticed and sent a maverick robot expert named Robotnik: Sonic's tough enemy in the Olympics, which Jim Carrey reinterpreted as a stupidity And sinister black eyes. The chase began. The panicked Sonic stumbled upon the boring and incredibly handsome local sheriff played by James Marsden-so the hard journey of intimacy and self-discovery is also underway .
The film simply doesn't work-but it's not due to a lack of effort or professionalism in its production. Dubbing Sonic's Marsden and Ben Schwartz (the immortal Jean-Ralphio from Parks & Recreation) is enough to play. Graphics and features are built from the oldest clichés, but for some reason they are clichés: they are sturdy and reliable. The scripts by Pat Casey and Josh Miller are absolutely full of gags, some of which are pretty good on paper. But for some reason I didn't laugh.
Not even Jim Carrey. This is Carrey's first major film character since 2014, and the first since Carrey painfully showed burnout and disillusionment with film characters in the disturbing documentary "Jim and Andy: The Thousand Worlds" Times. He performed very well in this mode, which made him a star like "Mask" and "Forever Batman": high-energy farce and vocal pyrotechnics with a strong manic edge, sometimes even in Threats mature. He provided Robotnik with a comical power per megawatt, but it was not fun. Perhaps it was the first time that director Jeff Fowler was completely out of time for comedy. Maybe it's because Carrey's heart is not true. Maybe both. The result is a slight sense of restlessness-especially in dance scenes without sound, which is probably the most memorable thing in the movie if not for the right reasons.
Why is this movie so strenuous? Why does it work so hard but get very little in return? It's easy to focus on less effective things like Carrey's performance or Sonic himself. As we all know, the character's appearance has been completely changed in post-production because he appeared in the first trailer-small eyes, muscular calves, human teeth-and was met with cat-level ridicule online. Now he looks like himself, but he also looks as if he doesn't belong to this frame, as if he was filmed entirely by Photoshop from another movie.
The real problem with this movie is elsewhere. This is because it does not involve Sonic's idea at all. The only moment of fan service is at the end, in scenes before and after credit, which hint at the possibility that Sonic's world and characters will come out (if any). To be sure, Sonic is fast-but Fowler's main work around Sonic's super-speed construction is a copy of the famous Quicksilver scene in X-Men: Days of the Future, just laughing. That's the speeding of comic books, in which time is broken down into a series of frozen moments, not the speeding of video games, and the whole world is accelerating with exciting blur. It has nothing to do with Sonic, because his game fans know him. This is nothing more than lazy-imagination failure.
Although Sonic movies are definitely not good, this is not to say that Sonic movies are bad. This was a bad idea from the beginning. This is a Hollywood cut-and-paste job formulated because of a lack of intellectual property. It will try to make a movie about any character that can be recognized without first asking who he is or why people like him.
