The Blue Blur makes green

That sound you heard this weekend was Jeff Fowler breathing a sigh of relief.

He had to be tense. As the director of the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie, Fowler received the brunt of the… let's call it "constructive criticism" as the collective movie-going population reacted to the nightmarish CGI model of everybody's favorite hyperactive hedgehog.

The backlash to the trailer resulted in a multi-million dollar makeover to the movie and its release date being pushed back from November to last weekend.

It seems though that the corrective effort was worth it. "Sonic the Hedgehog" had the most successful opening weekend of a live-action video game adaptation since… well… since the last one. Sorry, "Pokemon: Detective Pikachu," your reign was as well-earned as it was short-lived.

And yes. I contributed to that box office record.

So, as a lifelong fan of the Sonic franchise, here's my review.

It's fine.

It's not groundbreaking. Martin Scorsese won't be calling it "cinema" any time soon. I wouldn't even say it's the best live-action video game movie ever made.

But it's fine. There are some legitimately funny bits, some legitimately heartwarming bits, and Jim Carrey is in classic form. If you have a kid, or just want to bring out your inner kid for an afternoon, you'll probably enjoy yourself.

One thing that really sticks out to me though is that the movie seems to be in a constant battle with itself over how serious it wants to be about its own lore. Without getting into spoilers, the opening scene of the movie hints at a backstory far more elaborate than anything that ends up ultimately mattering. Fans of the franchise will recognize certain elements, but even those not familiar with three decades of Sonic's scattershot lore should get the sense that the movie's writers did a lot of world building that the movie itself barely scratches the surface of.

In any franchise like this, the first thing you do is create a "series bible." Something that documents your story's characters, history, internal rules, and anything else you'd need to maintain consistency in your continuity. In this case, Sonic is an alien hedgehog forced into hiding on Earth to escape a savage tribe of alien echidnas seeking the mysterious power that makes him go fast.

None of that backstory is actually necessary. Heck, none of the Sonic games have ever even bothered to put in the same effort of explaining how an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog with super speed lives on a world also populated by contemporary humans.

So it's bizarre to see so much apparent world building effort put into a movie that is ultimately just the latest in a long line of movies about CGI cartoon characters going on a road trip with a reluctant human escort. This movie is 100 minutes long and all of the most important things happen in either the first five minutes, the last five minutes, or the mid-credits stinger. In any of my social circles, those are the only parts of the movie being talked about. Everything in-between feels like a waste of time while we wait for a sequel to get into the real stuff.

It's actually kind of frustrating. The movie makes it clear that there is a far more interesting story at play, but the bulk of the runtime is dedicated to the tired old sequence of "Reluctantly team-up for a road trip, do some bonding, get into a fight, reconcile, accomplish the task, and learn that the real treasure was the friends you made along the way."

Like, make-up your mind, movie. If you want to tell a crazy story about a world full of talking animals fighting over magic powers while a maniacal scientist tries to turn everything into robots, do that. Don't hide that story in the cracks of a movie about James Marsden becoming friends with a cartoon mascot.

I like James Marsden. He's an underrated actor and deserves a better career than Hollywood has given him. But nobody's going to a Sonic the Hedgehog movie to see James Marsden drive around a cartoon any more than they went to "The Smurfs" to see Neil Patrick Harris drive around a cartoon or "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" to see Brendon Fraser drive around a cartoon.

(Seriously, Hollywood, enough already.)

I suppose conventional wisdom probably says that slapping Sonic into the most tried-and-true kid's movie plot possible was the safe choice. Insert Sonic elements into the same movie that's been made a hundred times over so you don't overwhelm the eight year-olds. That's how you get a $60+ million opening weekend.

On the other hand, I was eight years old when the original "Sonic the Hedgehog" animated series premiered on ABC. That show didn't pull any punches and nearly 30 years later is still highly regarded for standing out among its contemporaries.

On the other, other hand, that show got canceled after two seasons so what do I know? Nothing gold can stay, and apparently that includes gold rings.

On the other, other, other hand, "Pokemon: Detective Pikachu" saw a great deal of success by leaning in to its source material so maybe there's merit to that approach after all.

I don't know. I guess all I can hope for is that the sequel, and I sincerely hope there is a sequel, plays things a little less by-the-book.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and hopes the next movie knows the way.