For decades Hollywood has tried to make straightforward video game movies, and it barely ever worked out well. Doom was doomed, Warcraft failed to conquer the box office, and Prince Of Persia is lost to the sands of time. So now, we’re entering the ‘huh, this is a movie?’ era of video game adaptations – just when you’d got used to the idea of Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, the Sonic The Hedgehog trailer is here to make you question everything you’ve ever taken for granted about films, games, and possibly life itself.
The directorial debut of Jeff Fowler, the big-screen take on the super-speedy blue hedgehog sees Ben Schwartz voicing a CGI version of the beloved Sega icon. Elsewhere, the rest of the film is populated by human characters – including James Marsden as a Green Hills police officer who catches Sonic speeding, the US military who want to explore the nature of Sonic’s energy surges, and Jim Carrey who’s back on mega-mugging form as Dr. Robotnik. It’s… a lot. Sonic himself has human teeth and is about the size of a human child, he can apparently use rings as portals now, and looks to have Quicksilver-esque time-bending abilities. It is, frankly, baffling.
If you needed any more evidence that this is going to be completely unhinged, a post-credits sting to the trailer (which is apparently a thing now) sees a fully Robotnik-ed up Carrey apparently entering the game’s Mushroom Hill Zone.
If there’s something to savour here, it’s seeing Carrey return to a mode we haven’t seen in him since Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Sonic The Hedgehog – which, once again, is a movie that is happening, speeds into UK cinemas on Boxing Day.
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