More than half a year ago, when the first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer hit, we called its lead a “spiky, grossly-lumpy, rolled-up little blue ball … a kidney stone straight from the Devil’s dick to our mouths.” And we weren’t alone in the sentiment.
The internet was equally aghast and mocking of this wretched re-imagining of the video game icon as a soulless, muscular toddler by way of a Cronenbergian accident involving Mountain Dew Blue. The public outcry was enough that Paramount actually agreed to pour even more money into this film, tasking the visual effects teams responsible for summoning this creature to stuff him back into his Stygian abyss. Naturally, such an unnatural work of the dark arts takes time, so the film was delayed. Once set to come out last Friday, Sonic the Hedgehog was pushed to Valentine’s Day—a time of romance; love in the air, ready to impregnate our new Sonic like so much DeviantArt.
So was it worth the wait, worth all that overtime, VFX artists staring into this ungodly beast’s inappropriately bisected eyes?
Obviously not.
As seen in this new trailer featuring our retrofitted CGI star, yes, Sonic looks better now, if still weirdly, insistently misinterpreted from the original design they could have just used at any time and made everyone happy. But, yes, also the movie still looks absolutely terrible.
Seeming likely to give Hop star James Marsden a new nadir in playing against an unbearable, moppet-sized furry (and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li‘s Neal McDonough a poorer video game movie), the film is now both what was demanded and never wanted; an unwanted child replaced by one better looking but just as undesirable.
Anyway, Ben Schwartz voices Sonic and Jim Carrey plays Dr. Robotnik, and we’re just going to say it’s fine that his Robotnik isn’t an egg-shaped freak like the original, because please: no one needs to work on this anymore. Just let it instantly die on the spiked floor of the box office.
