Waleed Noaman

Let’s set matters straight: Sonic Movie is Awesome!! This is a light-hearted comedy adventure film, for kids AND adults AND fans alike. It may not be perfect, but this must be understood by anyone who wants to go out there, set their imaginations free, and have a good time. Trust me, I read the Rotten Tomatoes, the haters don’t know what they’re talking about. As many people are praising the movie for the acting and visuals, I want to share my point of view on the choice of the story, and why this movie makes for a great new start: As a fan myself, yes, I would’ve preferred the story-line be different, ideally to be set as in the original canon: at Sonic’s planet, Mobius, in the far future, with few humans involved. I also would’ve wanted Sally to come back … but hey, we don’t get all our wishes. But what’s wrong with coming to present-day Earth? Not much really! And why does Sonic end up as a wanted fugitive by the government? That’s up to you to find out! Sure, this leads to a different background story than the one fans are familiar with. But this has been the case with almost every superhero movie we know of today, and they all generally played out well! And if we come to analyze this movie specifically, this is intended to evolve around the Sonic-1 game, so no Tails, Knux or the rest for now. The way I see it, it is challenging to set a whole movie plot on just Sonic and Robotnik for 2 hours; I played the game, read the comics and the reboots on the same premise, and honestly, there isn’t much you could do with just Sonic-1 to be a movie by itself. So expanding on the premise with new ancillary characters to support the protagonists would set the foundations for a full-length feature just fine. In this case, in order to attract new moviegoers into the franchise, those had to be present-day humans (and I'm sure they'd do much better than to hastily make up any new anthropomorphic characters.) And if you’re anxious if Sonic will ever go back to his home planet, team up with the gang and kick more RoButtnick… spoiler alert, they will! And coming to the Sonic franchise, in my view there could be one of two genres this franchise could adapt: either as a light-toned comedy-slapstick-adventure, or as a more serious action-drama-adventure, and each one of them could have a different story-line (and slightly different character designs, voices, music ... etc.) Both ways would be great, but the general consensus currently seems to prefer the first, and this is where the movie is at! So, if a movie is released with a different story-line than than what some people may expect, this should not ruin whatever that was done in the past, nor whatever that would be done in the future. In a worst case scenario, there will always be a reboot! I see it as a nice way of diversity to have different takes on the same franchise, to fit with various audiences. This logic actually applies to every other superhero franchise. I mean, there’s Lego Batman, and then there’s the Arkham Knight. And at the very least, this movie serves way much better than any other plot-line that was used in all the video games that followed the MegaDrive trilogy. On a final note, the most important thing, for the first time in a while, is that the people made Hollywood listen. You know what I mean. That in my opinion had taken matters a long way to save the movie, and more stuff to be built upon in the future. Bottom line: this movie, and the releases to follow, are in good hands now. Still reading? Go see it now!!