By Zachary Jacquest/Entertainment Editor
The Blue Blur is back! First Sonic the Hedgehog ran through theatres this past Valentine’s Day and became one of the best openings for any video game adaptation-based movie, beating out the Warner Bros. picture Detective Pikachu.
Now, it’s available to stream on several services.
The movie, while based on the 1991 classic, is a well done reboot and reintroduces Sonic’s character. From beginning to end, the movie is entertaining, well written, comedic, and overall fun.
The movie is a live action film. In the past, video game characters being translated into real environments haven’t always had the best results. With the recent Detective Pikachu, however, it was shown that video game characters can look really good when transformed into a more realistic design.
Sonic’s design was pretty shaky at first… but after a lot of comments and criticism from fans, the design was brought back to the lab and a designer worked with Sega on Sonic’s design.
While the new design was much better and captured the blue hedgehog in a cool, creative, and iconic manner, sadly the company responsible for the 3-D modeling of the design went bankrupt soon after the design was revealed in a trailer.
The movie begins in a different world that looks really similar to Green Hill Zone, the first stage in the original Sonic the Hedgehog.
It shows a baby Sonic running through the hills and he eventually ends up in a forest hut with an owl named Longclaw. She soon senses danger approaching and attempts to escape from a tribe of Echidnas with Sonic in hand. One of the tribe members shoots down Longclaw with an arrow, and so as a last ditch effort, she gives Sonic a bag of gold rings and uses one of the special golden rings she had to warp Sonic to a different world, which ends up being Earth.
It later cuts to Tom Wachowzki, played by James Marsden, an officer from the very small U.S. city Green Hills, Mont., who wants to become a full-fledged police officer in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, Sonic is suffering depression from being alone and does the one thing he knows will calm him down … which is run. He ends up running too fast and causes a shockwave of sound that knocks out all the power of a large area of the planet, which easily catches the attention of the government.
Unable to explain what caused the power outage, the government enlists the help of Dr. Ivo Robotnik, played by Jim Carrey, an extremely intelligent scientist who has created his own technology and army of robots at his command.
Dr. Robotnik starts to pursue Sonic which makes him realize that he’s not safe on Earth anymore and thus must use another one of the rings to go somewhere else. While he’s doing this, however, he is caught by Tom, as he was hiding in his garage, and is shot with a tranquilizer dart due to being mistaken for a wild animal, which causes him to drop his bag of rings into a ring that went to SanFrancisco.
So, Sonic and Tom embark on a journey to find Sonic’s rings in San Francisco, as well as evade the pursuit of Dr. Robotnik.
This movie offers a realistic adaptation of the blue hedgehog and is a highly entertaining family movie. The characters are great, the story is fun, and the presentation is amazing. Overall, I give the Sonic the Hedgehog a movie a four-out-of-five.