The lead up and release of this movie sure was a roller coaster. When it was first announced. I fully expected it would be a slightly subpar kids movie in the same vein as Angry Birds or Alvin and the Chipmunks. Then the design was revealed and my expectations dropped further. I wasn't going to see the movie at that point just on principle. Luckily, they were willing to accept the overwhelming feedback and actually fix the movies poor design decisions which put me back to square one. Then the trailer came out and honestly I didn't like it very much, it pretty much confirmed in my mind that the movie would likely not be worth watching in theatres. I kept some small sliver of hope though and that hope came through as the first opinions started rolling in on release night. At first I was skeptical but quite a few "influencers" I like all voiced the opinion that it was either good or great. So I decided to watch the movie with my family today and I was actully looking forward to it. Let's quit beating around the bush and enter extreme spoiler/nitpick territory now. So right off the bat, I went into the movie hoping to get the classic SEGA sound effect from old sonic games. It didn't happen sadly, although the rings in the intro were a nice touch. So then we move onto a bit of a sonic origin story, which as far as I am aware hasn't really been officially explored very much at all. From what I've read, the idea of him being raised by an owl has come up in the past but Longclaw is an entirely new character to the sonic universe. Overall I thought this intro was ok, although it wasn't as fun as the rest of the movie. It did feel weird though that Sonic never really dwelled on the fact that his actions directly led to the (likely) death of Longclaw. One of his sad "I don't have a normal life moments" could have instead been "my new friends are going to end up like longclaw and its my fault." It would have been a nice juxtiposition of his whole "it's your fault I'm still stuck on earth" thing. Also while talking about the stuck on earth thing. I do like that they found a way to make rings vital to sonic in the story without going the video game route. I like the line about them being the method of interplanetary travel for advanced species. I guess Longclaw taught Sonic a lot even though he appeared to have led a sheltered childhood before getting stuck on Earth. It's that common trope in media where a society advances so far that they become almost indistinguishable from a small primitive society until they whip out a space ship or a laser gun. Moving onto the first main part of the movie... I feel like maybe they spent a little too much time on "sonic pretending he's multiple people jokes." Then they reveal that this sonic is a modern Electric Sonic unlike the gas powered sonics of the past (This is me trying to ignore the fart joke later in the movie <_<). It's interesting how they decided to make sonic a lot more powerful than he has been previously and I imagine they have plans for him to better control this "unlimited" power and as a result become super sonic in a future film. As it is, he could already be a powerful member of the Avengers with what he can do. Around this time we get to know the human characters like Tom and Robotnik a bit better. Robotnik works a lot better in the movie than in the trailer in my opinion. Although just like in the trailer the whole "nobody cares" scene wasn't quite as funny as they seemed to think it was. It's a ways away at this point but I was sad at the part in the movie where Sonic started calling him Eggman. At least worked up to it by having him nickname other characters first, even if the source of the name eggman was less convincing than in previous iterations of Sonic. Tom was ok but just kind of a typical likable main character. Seeing the sanic meme in the movie was definitely funny and overall I liked the little side bit about the "blue devil." It was both entertaining and functional as a way for the town to not be 100% shocked by Sonic when he shows up. Robotnik in this movie felt like a different take on the character. We got a lot of random little background tidbits and him interacting with humans a lot more than he typically does in the sonic games/shows I've watched. I liked his robots overall (especially the car chase scene) and I wonder if his insane loneliness on mushroom planet is going to drive him to create AI for them in the inevitable sequel. We've seen what he can do with modern human tech, now let's see what he can do with even more. Moving back to that car chase scene, oddly enough the biggest suspension of belief in this movie for me isn't that sonic is a teleporting alien with unlimited power but that Tom and Sonic are able to so easily evade the government when they are on the run for causing a giant emp pulse and more. It's just like, did the government really just task this one crazy robot guy on the case and refuse to help otherwise. They don't disguise their car, they take their time travelling and they even visit Toms family which would obviously would be under surveillance if anybody even slightly competent was trying to find them. They even let sonic drive, which would get them pulled over by any cop in the area who saw his driving and honestly just feels out of place considering Tom is supposed to be a police officer. I guess that's the second big suspension of belief though, Tom doesn't act very much like a police officer except in scenes where he needs to be one. It's like the opposite of Sergeant Angels inability to stop being a 24/7 police officer in Hot Fuzz. Something I've not touched on yet is how sonics speed is used throughout the movie. He's clocked going 300mph at the start and not much later travels at least 800 miles in a matter of seconds (and then he leaves a fish to die I guess?) I guess this means he can travel millions of miles per hour? They visualize this in the movie occasionally by showing it as if time is stopped and I think this may actually be the case. Sonic is fast of course but his power must also allow him manipulate the flow of time. This is really the only way to explain why physics isn't constantly exploding everything he touches while going fast. It also explains how robotnik would be able to accelerate his machine up to sonics speed and not just immediately ram into a wall like I do when I play games at 4x speed. All that's really left to discuss now is the end of the movie. I liked how sonic ultimately defeated Robotnik like he would in the video games, by rolling up into a ball and bouncing on his robot a whole lot. Sure it was kind of anticlimactic but sonics powers don't really lend themselves to a long dramatic final battle. I think the whole town teaming up against robotnik worked a lot better here than in many other movies. That may be more of a tone thing than anything else. Usually it feels out of place in a realistic movie or overdone in a silly movie but here it was fun. With Robotnik now trapped on a mushroom planet, I kind of hope we see some joke related to him building a "mushroom kingdom" in the next movie. If they hadn't repeatedly mentioned how uninhabited that planet was, I'd think the sequel was going to be a Mario crossover. I do suspect they specifically chose a mushroom planet as a mario reference so hopefully they make good use of that joke. Finally, if you haven't seen the movie or if you skipped out early then you may have missed the after credits scene (although you'd have to be crazy to not watch those pixel art credits). The first one shows Robotnik becoming a bit more robotniky, although honestly I think I prefer his normal mustache over the more cartoonish puffy one. The second one makes the existence of a sequel completely obvious. Thanks the backstory they have crafted for this Sonic, I imagine he probably has never met any of the typical sonic characters. It will definitely be interesting to see him meet tails in the next movie. My big question is if they'll do a Sonic & Tails, then a Sonic & Knuckles and then an avengers style team up movie. Or maybe the next movie will feature Sonic meeting a variety of classic Sonic characters. All I know is that I am looking forward to whatever they come up with next. And please Nintendo, take note. This movie was more enjoyable to me than Detective Pikachu because it better matched expectations from existing games/shows. You can do spin offs to other genres but it would be more fun if it wasn't the first live action movie in the series. Get us invested in the world before expanding it.