Sonic Fans Are Mad At Me For My Negative Movie Review. I Legitimately Love Them For It.

From Esquire

I didn't like the Sonic movie. After seeing the film last weekend, I wrote a jokey–albeit critical–review of the film in a format we often do here at Esquire called "20 Questions." Half of the essay is a sincere criticism of the movie, and the other half is a list of questions I had leaving the theater. I'll admit, I had a little fun with the questions part. For a movie this bad, goofing around felt only natural.

But overall, my confusion about Sonic the Hedgehog–a film that has not one but two product placement scenes for Olive Garden–was in earnest. Though it has a meager 65 percent from critics, some reputable publications actually gave the film glowing reviews. That was surprising, but fine! Meanwhile, fans adore this movie—it has a 94 percent from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and has broken box office records for video game-based movies.

These Sonic fans weren't too happy with my review. The day after it was published, the moderator of the official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter account, set up a camera in front of a green screen next to his dartboard and took to Twitter to voice his concern in a 2 minute video.

After the video was posted, my phone began to buzz. Sonic fans zoomed into the conversation with barbed comments about my writing. As I'm sure you can imagine, not every fan was so polite. One particularly angry fan said that my mother is a "fucking firecracker in the sack" who is "big on butt play." Fascinating! Not exactly sure how those thoughts connect with my article. In any case, I screenshotted his tweet and made a post joking that the Sonic fanbase is totally "normal" and that there is "nothing insane" about them. Of course, they didn't like that. Sonic fans started yelling at me for letting one Sonic fan speak for all Sonic fans. "Oh so now, one irritating person represents a whole community! WOW," wrote one fan. Another Twitter user said "Yeah, because one person represents everyone ever in the community obviously." Or, as one person eloquently put it, "As a friend of mine once said, bad people drink water does that make you a bad person?"

Which is fair! One fan does not speak for everyone, and the majority of the outrage I got was fairly tame and nice—with some angry exclusions. What's interesting is the passion of this fandom and their willingness to gang up on people who don't care for the blue hedgehog movie. It's a response that seemed similar—though not at all as toxic—as what Star Wars fans have done to critics.

So I did some digging into Sonic fandom, and found that it runs deep, and seems in general to be pretty friendly—unlike many loud Star Wars fans. The SonicTheHedgehog Subreddit is full of, well, typical Sonic stuff. Fan art. Theories about a possible sequel. Harmless memes. Sonic fans seem legitimately surprised–and warmed–at the fact that their movie is being received so well. Sure, the gap between the Audience Rating and the Critics score on Rotten Tomatoes is pretty wide, but whether critics like Sonic or not (contrary to what the marketing campaign may want you to think, a lot of them did not), the truth is, people seem to love Paramount's second attempt at the Sonic the Hedgehog movie.

I found a post on the Sonic Reddit that seems to really speak to the whole here. A Reddit user called "iamagarbagehuman66" (got to love Reddit!) said:

The post really puts everything–my article, the video, the comments, and the overall reception to the movie–into context. Sonic has been through a lot. After his heyday in the early '90s, game developers haven't managed to find a way to make the character click again. The past few decades of Sonic stuff has ranged from mediocre to downright deranged–like the 2006 re-imagining of the character, which depicts the hedgehog kissing his human girlfriend. I've always known there to be a pretty horny subculture of Sonic fans–search your name and then "the hedgehog" on Google Images with Safe Search disabled and you'll see what I mean. While there's nothing wrong with a little fan fiction, I'm only now realizing that, as in any fanbase, there are different kinds of Sonic fans, and I'm sure not all of them love that their favorite character is so routinely associated with, say, the Furry community (no judgement there either, of course).

Things only got worse for Sonic fans when early promotional material for the Paramount film revealed that the movie version of the character would look like a feral mongoose with grotesque human teeth. It was terrible, and like so many of the video games that preceded it, the film quickly became the subject of ridicule, the "butt of a bad joke." The ridicule was so bad, in fact, that the filmmakers decided to completely overhaul the design of the character. It was an unprecedented move in blockbuster films of this kind. Poor Sonic. He just can't get a break!

I think Sonic fans just wanted critics to give their favorite mascot a fair chance. And I did! I really did! In fact, back in April 2019 when everybody was joking about the original character design, I was out on Twitter defending the movie. I was! Look, we have the receipts!

The film just turned out far worse than I'd feared, though. I went in with an open mind, and left confused. It wasn't stupidly fun like Venom. It wasn't incomprehensibly weird like Cats (which I'd absolutely loved). Hell, it wasn't even immersed in the lore of the video game, like Detective Pikachu. It was just, well, bad. Dull. Forgettable. Full of product placement and surface-level pop culture references. Sonic spent most of the movie sitting in a car.

I'm all for Sonic. Few characters from video game history have stayed around for so long. Him, Tails, Knuckles, Eggman–they've been showing up in games, cartoons, and comics for decades. And I can respect that fans want him to stick around for a while longer. But the Sonic movie sucked. People have told me that since it's a "kids movie," I shouldn't criticize it. But I'm not buying that. Fans of all ages–kids or otherwise–deserved a good Sonic movie. The one we got was shallow and forgettable. Anyone who tells you otherwise might as well be living in fantasy world as disconnected from our reality as Green Hill Zone (Act 1).

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