







When will you learn? When will you learn? That your actions have consequences?

The SammyClassicSonFan Archive, 'Rant Against the Sonic Fanbase: You All Ruined Sonic'





This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter's film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism





I look back fondly on my youthful days spent dashing around the cyberpunk world of Sonic Adventure (1998), collecting Chaos Emeralds, smashing robots, and generally going fast. Little did I know that, like St. Peter before me, I was witnessing a white horse, whose rider was Death, and behind whom followed all manner of Hell. I assume neither did the creators of Sonic at SEGA. How could they know what they had wrought?





The release of the highly anticipated trailer for Sonic The Hedgehog (2019) sparked a fire online. Righteous fury of Sonic fans piled on to both the reimagining of their favourite blue hedgehog and the existence of the film in itself. To me, though, having as I do a brain that is large in every dimension, this trailer heralded an Event that would leave the world shaking. There's something beautiful in the way it speaks to the millennial generation - trapped within our own childhoods, struggling to escape and move forward, champing at the bit until that final Moment when we can break free and, as Sonic, break our own (metaphorical) sound barrier.





Where do we find Sonic in the first few moments? Trapped to a forest, a being of pure instinct. There's something chillingly true about his catchphrase, "gotta go fast". This isn't just an instruction on how to win at a game, no, it could never be so simple. Nor is it an imperative, a command, an order barked at the world. Within those three words is baked the necessary conditions for our existence imposed on us by our hyper-capitalist society. Like the film Speed (1994), to stop moving is to drop by the wayside, fall through the cracks, to starve and to die. Yet Sonic, trapped to his woodland realm, is only able to move chaotically around, with no direction, no purpose. He hoards shoes in his little cave out of that same inner drive; with no desire beyond following his body, he is left with compulsion.





Like every other millennial, Sonic has issues with cleaning his room and throwing out old clothes.

It is only when Sonic transforms this negative drive into positive forward motion, both psychologically and literally, that he is able to change the world around him. Those confused about the choice of Coolio's Gangster's Paradise as the accompanying soundtrack to the trailer are missing the key thematic point that the movie is quite clearly getting at. Sonic's initial existence, trapped in a forest to aimlessly move around, accomplishing nothing but the hoarding of a few bits of dilapidated trash, speaks to the same absurd Sisyphian existence described by Albert Camus that Coolio discusses through Gangster's Paradise. Where Coolio is of course referring to the lived experience of black Americans, Sonic The Hedgehog (2019) is trying to universalise that experience across race, gender, and orientation. The film sets itself up as an allegory of millennial existence within its opening scenes, making Sonic's declaration, "Gotta go fast", no longer a statement of things as they are. Now, it is an imperative. It is a call to arms. Sonic the Hedgehog shouts to the young of today with the revolutionary drive of Vladimir Lenin and the accelerationist principles of Juan Posadas, as he looks to the long, open road and makes the sound-breaking decision to commit an act of terror so brilliant that the entire U.S. military complex sets themselves upon him.





This, then, is the film's inciting incident. Already this text is layered with meaning and allegory, commentary upon commentary. When Sonic breaks the sound barrier, what barriers must we break in order to follow? When Sonic causes a power outage across the entire Pacific Northwest, does the film then vilify him? Is Sonic an antihero? Are we just following the villain?





No.





Set against the military-industrial complex, headed by Jim Carrey's Dr. Robotnik - who is clearly channeling his early self, in keeping with the film's theme of breaking away from '90s dissatisfaction and aimlessness towards a better tomorrow - we are encouraged to root for this insurrectionist and his ex-cop friend. James Marsden's arc, by the way, since you were wondering, finds him first as a cop attempting to find and stop the revolutionary Sonic, then sees him begin to move away from his own class as he follows in his new friend's wake, and then what? Maybe we see him take the initiative, to fully reject his own class and realise his own revolutionary potential. This arc could be summarised as: he tails Sonic; he shadows Sonic; he knuckles down.





And how does the true villain change throughout the film? Robotnik starts as a Man in Black - a figure of shadowy, covert authority. Behind his quips to the nameless military officer, there is one line that truly hints at his position as Dr. [eg]G-Man: "In a sequentially ranked hierarchy, based on a level of critical importance, the disparity between us is too vast to quantify". Clearly, the level of technology he throws at Sonic throughout the trailer indicates just how high his clearance goes. Still, revolutions create narratives, and narratives create characters. They bring out the core truth behind every ambiguity. Our first glimpse of Robotnik being pulled into the revolutionary narrative is not when we see him in his traditional shade of red - it's earlier, when we see him with his glasses broken. The cracks in the façade of the establishment show, and clearly foreshadow its slide into wide-scale, authoritarian violence in order to crush the anti-establishment threat.





The mask slips.

When Sonic tells James Marsden that he is here to "save your planet", we are drawn to the question: from what? We must assume that his initial act of terror was part of this need to save our planet (this line makes it quite clear that Sonic is not, in fact, a hedgehog, but an extraterrestrial of some sort). But it isn't until after that the military and Robotnik are involved. Is the film not suggesting that Sonic is trying to save our planet from ourselves, or rather, from our own inaction to save it ourselves? Again, is there not evidence within the glimpse into this most important of texts that we have been given, that the entire point of this film is as a radical call to arms? As article after article tells us that the planet is choking, and our society is on the brink of collapse into barbarism, what could be timelier than Sonic The Hedgehog (2019)? Despite the naysayers, here it is at last: the revolutionary film that we both need and deserve, in our most crucial hour.