Grading on a curve

Last week was a good week for geekdom.

Disney+ launched, giving viewers endless binging opportunities to fill their weekend once they finished watching "The Mandalorian."

High profile games like the new Pokemon entry and "Star Wars – Jedi: Fallen Order" have released to generally positive acclaim.

And we finally got a new look at the re-done CGI design for the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie.

As you may recall, or perhaps mentally blocked, last May's initial reveal of Sonic the Hedgehog's cinematic design was possibly the single most unifying event of 2019. A nation divided over so many issues came together with one voice and said, "What have you done! Why did you create this monstrosity?!"

Negative feedback was so strong that within days director Jeff Fowler announced that they would be going back to the drawing board, with Paramount Pictures even allowing the movie to be pushed back three months to give the animators time to effectively redo everything they had done.

This doesn't happen. Hollywood is not known for swiftly responding to negative feedback and when they do, it's generally not in a constructive manner.

Fowler's assurance that the issue would be resolved turned abject horror into cautious skepticism. How much could they really change at this stage? What guarantee did we have that a redesign wouldn't be even worse, if that were even possible?

Last week those questions were answered and the verdict is in.

It looks fine.

Gone are the unnervingly human-ish anatomical features, replaced with a more cartoonish design far closer to what people generally expect Sonic to look like.

So here we are.

After delaying the movie four months and, if internet scuttlebutt is to be believed, spending $35 million, the Sonic the Hedgehog movie looks okay.

Possibly good. Definitely not great. But okay.

Like "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and "The Smurfs" before it, "Sonic the Hedgehog" now looks like your standard, by-the-numbers, kids movie about a cartoon mascot befriending a C-list actor (sorry, James Marsden, you deserve better) that drives them around a contemporary Earth.

So. Is it worth seeing?

On the one hand, it feels like Paramount should be rewarded for the extra effort that was put into this movie. They could have done nothing and subjected the world to that nightmarish Sonic design through a months long promotional campaign. Had they not reversed course, they would right now be paying to have trailers of that blue abomination running across every television and streaming service out there.

Instead, they listened to feedback and went to great expense to rework the movie in a way that would not leave all who saw it with everlasting night terrors.

This is good and more studios should follow their example.

On the other hand, none of that means the movie is good.

Had the newly redesigned Sonic been presented from the start I would have shrugged and written off the movie as an inconsequential kids film with a cookie-cutter plot. Even as a fan of both Sonic and Jim Carrey, it's unlikely I would have gone far out of my way to catch this movie.

Should we be grading on a curve here? Does Paramount deserve our time and money for what will assuredly be a sub-par movie just because we know how much worse it could have been?

If we consumers are supposed to be voting with our wallets, what kind of message does that send?

A similar debate can be made about the previously mentioned Star Wars game. Electronic Arts' last attempt at a Star Wars title was so full of exploitive micro-transactions that Congress started to give the video game industry the side-eye.

Their new game seems to indicate that they've learned their lesson. By all accounts, "Star Wars – Jedi: Fallen Order" appears to be a complete single player experience. You buy the game. You play the game. That's it.

While this is certainly a refreshing change of design philosophy from one of the most hated publishers in the industry, should "this game hasn't been built from the ground up to nickel-and-dime you" really be lauded as a selling point?

On the other hand, should players avoid a perfectly good game just because the publisher has done shady things in the past?

There really isn't a right or wrong answer I suppose.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and had to end this column before he started to dive into the philosophical differences between deontological ethics and consequentialism and how they relate to Sonic the Hedgehog