Gotta Talk Fast: Thoughts on Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

 “. . . [N]owadays it’s all you see anymore is cops, the tube is saturated with . . . cop shows, just being regular guys, only tryin to do their job, folks, no more a threat to nobody’s freedom than some dad in a sitcom. . . . Get the viewer population so cop-happy they’re beggin to be run in. . . . and while you’re at it please kick my
door down. . . .”

- Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009)  

 

“Ben Schwartz in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).” IMDb, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3794354/mediaviewer/rm3256003073/. Accessed 15 Jan. 2022.

 

I feel like a lot of reviews of Jeff Fowler’s 2020 video-game-to-film adaptation Sonic the Hedgehog could likely begin the same way—with a listing of Sonic-related experiences, essentially establishing fandom cred before getting into a review of what is ultimately, inescapably, a movie for fans, be they kids or adults. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone engaging with Sonic the Hedgehog as just a movie or judging its merit as just a movie. I’d love to get inside their head, though, and to find out what impressions this film might create (pre- and post-viewing) if approached in total ignorance of the long-lived property it’s adapting. I mean that genuinely. There are certain experiences in life that I can only really know from my own perspective because it’s impossible to escape what I already know. In this case, I can’t not be a Sonic fan (or at least someone who has spent a lot of time with a lot of different Sonic media over the years), so it’s hard to look at Sonic the Hedgehog objectively as a film, to see what value it might have on its own merits rather than what it has via association with all that other media. It feels special in a way, though it isn’t really. Kids’ movies or movies made for fans of a certain property are still films and should still be reviewed and evaluated the same way as any other release. And yet, the question of overall quality feels frivolous with this one in the face of the larger question of whether Sonic the Hedgehog is a good adaptation or not. Do its creative choices serve the property well?

            In terms of a review as a film, in as objective of terms as possible, Sonic the Hedgehog is not bad, but it isn’t good either. In isolation, absent the aforementioned media associations, it is mostly neutral in terms of performances, visuals, sound, and so forth. There is a huge CG element to this film in the form of the Sonic character, and he has about as much presence as these creations ever do. It feels awful to criticize what was a double-huge labor for the digital artists who brought the character to life once and then had to redo all that work when the initial reveal of the design resulted in so much backlash, but Sonic just doesn’t have any substance in this film. The same is true of the titular BFG in the 2016 live-action film or the dog-dragon Elliot of the 2016 Pete’s Dragon live-action remake (both notable here only because I watched them recently). There’s a lack of true physicality and weight to CG creations that can be counter-balanced with good use of practical effects (see something like Michael Dougherty’s 2015 Christmas creature feature horror-comedy Krampus), but Sonic the Hedgehog just looks and feels like what it is—every modern blockbuster with CG characters interacting with human actors.

The question of why this movie isn’t just entirely computer animated is inescapable. Into the Spider-Verse (2018) isn’t just a great Spiderman movie specifically or even a great superhero movie generally: It is proof positive (to me, at least) that the sort of superhero antics and colorful characters you would associate with a Spiderman or, say, a Sonic the Hedgehog film are actually best served by the flexibility, stylization, and ultimate visual coherence that a full-on animated feature can provide. Sonic the Hedgehog looks fine. It looks good, even—but only within the context of it being what it is, which is another modern blockbuster. It looks like everything else: Great, light-years better than what we would have once thought possible with CGI not even all that long ago, but it truly feels like we’ve also plateaued at this point and that as much as we’re capable of creating anything with computers, nothing we create manages to impress (me) quite as much as prosthetics, puppetry, and miniatures.

            Sonic the Hedgehog has some weirdly prominent product placement for Olive Garden, of all things, but, more annoyingly still, it commits the cardinal (but not at all uncommon) sin of so much modern media in that it never shuts up. Sonic talking a mile a minute makes a certain kind of sense given the character, but it is still a flaw that this film feels the need to fill every moment. It’s the “Well THAT just happened” style of writing that’s become so ever-present and odious and that ultimately stems from unwillingness to just let a moment be. There is a fundamental distrust of the audience’s ability to actually invest in the film if something capital-W “whacky” isn’t happening or being said constantly. Sonic can’t just hide from robots scanning for him in an attic, for instance. Instead, he has to narrate the entire thing so that we know exactly how funny and tense the situation is, and then he has to comment on the stairs being uncomfortable when he rolls down them to escape since that moment absolutely needed a “joke” too (lest people start falling asleep or something). Jim Carrey as Sonic’s longtime antagonist Dr. Robotnik fits into this chatty atmosphere like a glove (for better or for worse) since he’s well-known for bodily and vocal exuberance and never being able to stand still or shut up in many of his performances. In that regard, Carrey is absolutely perfect for this kids’ comedy-drama. He can’t just analyze Sonic’s quill and figure out that it contains unlimited power. He has to also cavort and flail around to a licensed song about being evil while he does it.

I’m not saying the movie was never genuinely funny or moving or dramatic, but those genuinely good moments are hampered by the ineffective ones. It’s a paint-against-the-wall approach to obtaining audience investment where more is more, especially with regard to the comedy. It feels (appropriately?) like a movie that would be best enjoyed by an audience of kids since they will have been conditioned to see this sort of mile-a-minute chatter as how things are done. I don’t think Sonic the Hedgehog is worse than a lot of other modern mainstream media, though clearing that bar isn’t necessarily an accomplishment. It’s “good” in the sense that it seems like a competent execution of modern design trends more or less on par with its contemporaries, to the best of my understanding, but it’s “bad” in the sense that it only rises as far as those standards and no higher, meaning that to anyone who doesn’t care for those particular design sensibilities (specifically the way that its humor is written and executed) it isn’t going to be considered good.

            If all I had were those unexciting, stodgy thoughts to share, then I wouldn’t have written this piece at all, but, as I’ve already said, I care a lot less about Sonic the Hedgehog as a film and am mostly interested in it as an adaptation of the property. I actually do like a few of the things the film does with the fantasy Sonic elements. I like that this isn’t just the same “canonical” Sonic that vaguely exists in the world of the games, for example. It’s a new character, and a young one at that. I had imagined an adaptation along the lines of something like The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), where the previous canon still exists and the title cartoon characters are experienced pre-existing versions of themselves put into new circumstances. Instead, this is a young, new Sonic, and I appreciate that the filmmakers had the apparent creative liberty to start from scratch with their own canon. On that note, I can also appreciate the wide creative swerve from the existing Sonic media that the film takes by categorizing the fantasy elements, including Sonic himself, as literally alien. That may actually be less daring than the, at this point, traditional approach of just envisioning a planet Earth that happens to have big, colorful, anthropomorphic animals living alongside humans, but it is, if nothing else, something different.

They did make the dangerous assumption that this film adaptation of a video game would actually perform well enough to make good on the promise of the meatier fantasy elements that are only teased here (Echidnas! Lots of them! Very early in the film, even!), but that gamble has actually paid off since Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is already a thing and very obviously expanding the cast and universe exactly how you would expect, by bringing in Tails and Knuckles. Ben Schwartz does a fine job playing Sonic. He has the enthusiastic and clean-cut voice that that role seems to require (in my head, at least). The use of the iconic golden rings as warp technology also works well. I initially only associated rings with staying alive/health in the video games and was a bit baffled by the leap from low-value, dime-a-dozen collectible to powerful teleportation technology but then remembered their prior role as teleporters in other Sonic media and decided I thought that usage in the film was a sensible expansion of the concept. For instance, the games’ special stages were sometimes accessed through giant spinning rings, and big rings have also sometimes been the goal at the end of stages for certain Sonic games. They’re not necessarily, literally warp points but do “warp” the player to the next level in that sense. While I haven’t dug into my Archie Sonic comic collection in a while, my feeling is that rings have also similarly been used for transportation there, so this Sonic film seems fairly loyal to what has come before in that regard.

            My feelings about the depiction of the only other (or at least only other prominently-featured) Sonic media character in the film are a lot more mixed. As previously established, Jim Carrey plays Dr. Robotnik, and the character feels like an odd fit from the moment some very normal-looking US officials first utter his name. On the other hand, the idea of a “normal” human slowly transforming into the more deranged cartoon genius we’re familiar with after being repeatedly defeated by Sonic is a fun touch that fits with the level of Hedgehog-induced exasperation we see from Robotnik in other media. On the other other hand, there’s Carrey’s actual performance. Basically, like I said before, he is being Jim Carrey here. I’m not sure whether that was what was expected of him or if it’s just the performance he turned in, but it is literally the same sort of shtick everyone always associates with him. Goofy facial expressions, bodily contortions, weird voices, yelling—The hits are all here.

Overall, in terms of voice and mannerisms, Carrey doesn’t really look or feel anything like the character (quite unlike Ben Schwartz, who genuinely does sound Sonic-like), and the performance also feels boring and lackluster since he doesn’t even seem to be trying for a Take on the character so much as he is just phoning it in and being “funny” in a general sense. Although, again, in all fairness, Carrey may very well have been essentially asked to do that. I just do not think he was a good choice for Robotnik, outside of a sort of epilogue where he is stranded on a mushroom planet and very briefly sounded like he might have been trying to do the Dr. “Eggman” voice from the 3D Sonic games. That sort of transformation into the character we know does seem to be an intentional part of the character’s progression in the film (how his mustache goes from pretty normal-looking to the classic massive, luxurious Robotnik ’stache, for example), but his voice and behavior in the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 trailer seem like a match for most of this film, so it’s not quite as dramatic of a transformation as I feel would be required to make the portrayal here retroactively better to an extent.

All that being said, I don’t feel absolutely negative about Robotnik in the movie. I actually went back and forth between being unimpressed and/or annoyed with him to thinking that he absolutely did manage to nail (accidentally or otherwise) exactly the sort of insufferable, socially-inept jackass lacking in self-awareness that such a genius with so much power would probably be in real life. It’s a bit like Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in Zack Snyder’s Batman v. Superman (2016). The casting and performance are not necessarily true to the character fans might want to see from prior media but do capture something like what that character might have been like as a person. Carrey’s Robotnik walks out of his weird HP Omen gaming desktop-ass truck in his first scene and just starts laying into the leading military dude in front of him in the most obnoxious, insistently-unfunny way possible. And he does the same thing with every person he meets. A generous reading of Carrey’s performance could be that this Robotnik desperately wants to be the big man on campus, so to speak, and wants to be cool and put people down hard but that he’s really just a nerd who can’t be anything but cringe and annoying when he tries to be a badass.

A better film might actually have done something meaningful with the minor revelation that, of course, Robotnik was bullied as a kid and the accompanying implication that he has essentially turned into a bully himself using his technological know-how and the authority his government position confers. There is actually a potentially noteworthy moment that feels almost intentional with James Marsden’s character when Robotnik momentarily stops yammering quite so forcefully after he’s caught in a lie about being from the power company. He kind of takes a step back in a sense, like the movie may be intentionally suggesting there might be a thinking, scheming human being beneath the non-stop bluster as Robotnik pauses (maybe genuinely a little surprised that the unintelligent yokel has actually out-maneuvered him) and surreptitiously releases his drones to scan the house for Sonic while he distracts its owner. Otherwise, it’s a depiction and performance with essentially no nuance. As I said, I went back and forth on my exact feelings, though my final thought is that it may be a bad casting choice and bad performance that nonetheless accidentally manages to touch on something interesting.

            The last element of Sonic the Hedgehog I will comment on is what I see as the extremely poor choice to team Sonic up with an adult—specifically a cop. I won’t beat around the bush here: As much as TV and films and books and so forth have worked overtime over the years to establish a tradition of cops as the self-sacrificing blue-collar heroes that this movie’s representation of law enforcement draws on, the timeliness of this particular pairing feels off. Granted, the movie started production years ago, but the increased public awareness of the criminality of police—the extrajudicial killings and assaults, the theft, the gang culture, the racism, the spouse and partner abuse—just makes this whole scenario of a “Aw gee shucks gwarsh” small-town cop who just wants to Put His Life On The Line For Once Dammit by moving to the big city to Protect People feel ill-considered and ill-fit for the times, if not just downright rancid. It’s also a bad pairing since I don’t think Sonic fits well with a cop. He’s always been a rebel, fighting some form of totalitarianism or the other (usually Robotnik in some capacity), and his characterization as a free spirit that lives by his own rules and his own true sense of justice just clashes with the idea of a uniformed, government-sanctioned law enforcer who camps out on a long straight stretch hoping for someone to break the speed limit so he can see some action.

It’s kind of petty-feeling but worth noting that, logically, in a real-world setting, Sonic is a non-stop lawbreaker just by virtue of how fast he moves around. And that’s without getting into how his character clashes with so many other, far more serious facets of the status quo a cop exists to prop up. For example, I find it hard to imagine Sonic seeing it as good and just that we’re keeping people caged in torturous conditions on our border and that it’s against the law Marsden’s so-called “Donut Lord” serves to break them out since, from Sonic’s very first appearances, he’s been associated with freeing the imprisoned (fellow animals in capsules or turned into robots in the fiction).

I also don’t think Sonic pairs well with an adult in general, though you could maybe make it work if it was a sort of inner child/nostalgia thing focused on the long-standingly canonical, experienced Sonic (see The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle). Marsden and his partner end up becoming something like parents to this Sonic, and it does make sense with this version of the character since he’s more like a kid (something explicitly mentioned in the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 trailer), but that also makes the way that Marsden is kind of like a father in the end but also like a buddy or peer throughout weird as well. He could match with an older and more experienced Sonic, but it would still make more sense for the intimate friends in an adaptation to be kids, given that the character belongs to a kids’ property. Undoubtedly, the character does sit in an awkward spot, though, since Sonic is a kids’ character but with a lot of adult fans due to the longevity of the brand, and that is probably responsible for some of the awkwardness.

I still think Sonic’s best partner is a kid, however—maybe two kids, specifically a boy and a girl for maximum marketability. You could have one adventurous but inexperienced and the other one timid but good-hearted. In comes Sonic (young or seasoned), and the rest of the movie writes itself: Robotnik’s machines creeping around at night looking for Sonic or the Chaos Emeralds or something, the disbelieving adults (certainly a parent or two) that don’t listen at first but then come around in time to probably drive the kids and Sonic somewhere during a climactic moment while some big robot chases them. You could definitely still find a way to galivant to San Francisco and could still have Sonic effectively adopted into the family in the end. It’s not like the actual movie we got is wildly original in terms of its hedgehog-human dynamics anyway, so going the E.T.-esque route could have worked out just as well, with the same level of creative déjà vu but then also, critically, minus the valorization of cops. Of course, all this discussion is pointless. I just want to illustrate why I feel like the dynamic the filmmakers chose is such an odd choice to me, both because of the optics of telling this sort of story about a cop and also because of how weird it feels to pair Sonic with someone other than a child.

            In conclusion, then, I wouldn’t say I liked Sonic the Hedgehog as a movie. It was a fun exercise to examine it as an adaptation, however. It’s not without its pleasant touches—like the initial end-credits sequence with its recreations of movie scenes using visuals reminiscent of the old 2D Sonic graphics—but it’s not something I could see mattering much to anyone outside of brand recognition/nostalgia/curiosity. I’ll certainly watch the sequel since it will give me even more to mull over, like whether I ultimately think Idris Elba is a good fit for Knuckles (currently leaning towards “no” based on the voice work from the recent trailer) and whether I’d like to see them keep going with these or not. Absolutely nothing seems to have changed creatively in the sequel based on the trailer, and it even manages to explicitly work in the idea of Sonic as a sort of superhero in order to better cash in on our current, incredibly lucrative cultural obsession, as if Sonic wasn’t clearly heroic as a character without the need to associate him directly with the likes of Batman or whoever… As it stands, Sonic the Hedgehog feels like a film almost exclusively for curious (maybe excited) fans and not something that will really stand the test of time on its own merits. While I’ve never watched them in earnest, a connection I keep coming back to is with the Paul W.S. Anderson Resident Evil movies—themselves adaptations of video games with their own crazy-quilt-style canon hodgepodge of video game and original elements that you could probably most generously say are “interesting,” and that only insofar as there’s some potentially fun analysis to be done combing through them as adaptations specifically to see how they choose to work in and/or alter the source material. Just like my mixed feelings about the film in general, my ultimate answer to the question “Do Sonic the Hedgehog’s creative choices serve the property well?” is a definitive “yes but also no.”