Sonic Movie [Trailer 2 Reaction]

Well, it finally happened! The new trailer for the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog movie officially released yesterday. Was the official redesign worth the wait? Is the new trailer better than the last? Let’s have a look and find out. First up, of course, the trailer itself:

Let’s start off with the thing that everyone was most interested in: Sonic’s new design. This look is much more like the Blue Blur we know from the games. He’s cartoony, he’s got the gloves and shoes, and he’s super emotive. The only real visual difference between this Sonic and the games is that his arms are blue rather than tan. I think we can all live with that. I mean, Shadow’s arms are black rather than white, right? And Silver’s are…well…silver. So, why shouldn’t a movie sonic have blue arms?

In all seriousness though, while I thought that the original design was picked on far more than it needed to be, this is a huge improvement. The titular hedgehog looks cute, cool, and c-awesome. And, since everyone kicked up about it, I see that they fixed his teeth too.

His movements are exaggerated, but in the right way, which adds to the cartoon feel of it all. And the action scenes, which stood out for me in the first trailer, look killer with this design. The only Sonic-related visual flop for me was the scene with him running inside the washing machine. He looked too small, certainly smaller than he does in the rest of the trailer. That Fist of the North Star level of shrinking and growing was off-putting before, so I hope it doesn’t prove to be prevalent in the film.

The Green Hill Zone scene right at the start looked beautiful. The only downside to it was that it left me wanting to see a whole movie in that setting. What we see of the human world works though. The general scenery is nice enough, and the Robotnik/Eggman scenes have just the right level of futuristic tech to fit with the character.

From an audio standpoint, I noticed a distinct lack of Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise. I like the song, but it really didn’t feel like a good fit for Sonic. Now, Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones? That is a much better fit. It has attitude and energy, and that’s what a Sonic movie needs. Did you also pick up on the little audio nods to the Mega Drive/Genesis music in the first third of the trailer? That was really cool.

Strangely, even the tone of the film seems different in this trailer. The gags felt better executed and made me smile a lot more, perhaps due to the increased focus on Sonic looking adorable. Meanwhile, Jim Carrey still feels like a scene-stealer in terms of the human cast. His performance looks like vintage, Ace Ventura era Carrey, and that works remarkably well here.

So, where do is stand overall? Way back, I jokingly said the original trailer was fake and the actual thing would be really different. To be clear, I outright stated in the post that this wasn’t really all a publicity stunt or anything like that. I don’t actually believe this is some grand hedgehog conspiracy. The shift here is immense though. The animators and designers – which now include Tsyon Hesse of the Sonic Mania animated shorts – did a fantastic job. They’ve clearly worked hard to fix the issues that the fans had and their effort shows. So, thank you to those involved, you’ve done great!

This has gone from my original reaction that it would be a serviceable buddy cop movie that happens to feature Sonic to something else entirely.

As of this trailer, the Sonic movie looks fun, frenetic, and so much better than I think many expected. If this trailer doesn’t give you faith that the movie may be enjoyable, then honestly, I don’t think anything will. One thing I am very confident about though is this: it may be different to the games, but it no longer looks like Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter will be ousted as the worst live-action video game movies.