24 Feb Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)

Worlds Amiss

As readers know, I am happy to go with the flow, and be swept up in the energy of these things. The first class citizen is the action, colour, effects, and humour. The second class order are the characters, the agents that we see that make things happen, or in the noir form have things happen to them.

And under that in the normal case as we have here, is the cosmology of the world. If that is compelling, then the others have an easy go. Marvel and Star Wars are coasting on this.

But the contract is that when I come to these, the filmmaker has to deliver all three. In order for the action sequences to work, we need the other two. World building is hard, very hard. You have to both invent and convey. For better or worse, Michael Bay understands this, so when he adopts a world many viewers will know, he assumes nothing and works on all three layers. Harry Potter may be the best example of this, because in each instalment, new dynamics were introduced and more importantly registered with the viewer.

I know I have seen one of the prior hedgehog films, but watching this I see the action, competent enough I suppose. I get the characters; you don’t have to know much to read the stereotypes. And I get the story such as it is: for some reason an unhappy scientist has waited 50 years to free a similarly unhappy alien so they can eliminate the world using a world-killing machine that the scientist seems to have tricked an ultra wealthy government agency into building.

And then there’s the good guys, And a couple characters in the middle, the scientist’s grandson , Eggman, who is a regular villain, and his lackey.

No mention of the father in between, or the role of the 13 year old girl who would be Eggman’s aunt. She’s apparently all explained in a backstory from one of the parallel properties. Sick, died, or in this version, shot, died, or maybe blown-up, died.

Anyway, it is cartoons, right? So we allow some slop in the story.

What’s the mess is that underlying layer. The cosmology doesn’t have to make sense in the ordinary way, but we have to know what forces are at work. Before you get to that, the simple human reflex for revenge makes no sense. A girl died? Was killed? So the planet needs to be vaporised? And the revenge has to wait 50 years? And somehow GUN was tricked into making the world-killing machine? In the heart of London? With two keys? So the emotional drivers don’t work.

But deeper than this. Maybe game fans would know. We have three super-powerful forces. There’s the extraterrestrials, and then there are two all-powerful technology-based groups. One is the standard trope of the single genius scientist who makes scads of gear with no factory of Oompa Loompas. The other also is a trope, the presumably official monster government agency with unlimited resources and tech, protected by ordinary thugs and managed by bozos.

I guess.

Posted in 2025

Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

IMDB