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I don’t play many video games these days, but when I was a kid in the ‘90s, I used to love them. I had both NES and Sega Genesis, and some of my favorite games were Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I still remember all the joy I used to get from running through the loops, picking up rings, and defeating the evil Dr. Robotnik, so it should come as no surprise that I’m a big fan of the Sonic films as well. I love the first two movies, and coming into 2024, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was one of my most anticipated films of the year. I couldn’t wait for the inevitable ‘90s nostalgia rush this movie would bring, so when tickets went on sale, I bought one for opening night as soon as I got the chance.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was directed by Jeff Fowler, and it stars Jim Carrey, Lee Majdoub, James Marsden, and Tika Sumpter along with the voices of Ben Schwartz, Colleen O'Shaughnessey, Idris Elba, and Keanu Reeves. In the film, Sonic and his pals Tails and Knuckles have to save the world once again, but this time, they face off against more than just Dr. Robotnik. The evil scientist’s long-lost grandfather is also in the mix, and he’s teamed up with Shadow, a hedgehog with nearly unstoppable powers and a dark past. As you might be able to guess from that somewhat vague plot synopsis, the story isn’t the real draw here. In fact, from a pure narrative perspective, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 isn’t all that great. While the core of this story (Sonic vs. Shadow) is clear from the beginning, it takes a while for the conflict to fully take shape, and along the way, the plot shifts more times than a good story should. In a similar vein, events often happen simply because the plot calls for them, with little or no discernible narrative logic. For instance, Dr. Robotnik appeared to die at the end of the last Sonic movie, so I was curious to learn how he managed to cheat death. And now that I’ve finally seen Sonic the Hedgehog 3, I’m still curious because the film never explains it. We just find out that the not-so-good doctor is alive, and the filmmakers don’t bother to tell us anything more. Admittedly, that’s the most egregious example, but even when the movie isn't quite that lazy, the connective tissue often feels frustratingly thin. In that sense, this is very much a typical kids’ story, so don’t go into it expecting Shakespeare. Instead, the real draw here is the characters and all the charm, heart, and awesome action they bring with them, and on that front, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a total blast. To begin, Sonic and his crew have all the quirky charm that endeared them to viewers the first two times around. Their tight-knit friendship is as heartwarming as ever, and when they joke around, they’re absolutely hilarious. In particular, Knuckles might be even funnier than he was in the last film, so if you’re a fan of his almost Drax-like dim-witted humor, you’re in for a real treat. However, as great as the heroes are, the villains in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 just might steal the show. Jim Carrey reprises his role as the evil Dr. Robotnik, and he’s…well, he plays the character as only he can, and if you’ve seen either of the first two Sonic movies, you know exactly what I mean. But unlike those other films, Carrey gets to have double the fun this time around. He also plays Robotnik’s grandfather, and the scenes where his two characters share the screen are some of the best in the entire film. Whether the Robotniks are fighting, dancing, or just making up for lost time, Jim Carrey has surprisingly great chemistry with himself, and he brings an unparalleled feeling of pure joy to this dual role. Last but not least, we have to talk about Shadow. He’s the newbie of the bunch, and he’s more than a worthy addition to this amazing cast of characters. For starters, like I said before, this hedgehog is almost unstoppable. In fact, there’s a scene where he single-handedly takes out Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles in a matter of seconds, so he’s hands down the biggest threat our lovable blue hedgehog has ever faced. His powers are similar to Sonic’s, but he has a trump card nobody can match. This creature can teleport like Nightcrawler from the X-Men, so he doesn’t just move fast. He moves instantaneously, and that ability makes for some excellent fight sequences. On top of all that, Shadow also has one of the most tragic backstories we’ve seen all year. Like his heroic counterpart, he too is from another planet, but when he arrived on Earth, he immediately became the government’s lab rat. His life was almost entirely pain and suffering, and even when he did make a friend, she was tragically taken from him. The whole thing is just heartbreaking, and when Shadow returns to his old stomping grounds and finds the place deserted and run down, the visuals bring this hedgehog’s agony to life in a stark way. A couple of his scenes might even bring a bit of moisture to your eyes, but he’s not the only tearjerker in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Just about everybody in the movie gets (at least) an emotional beat or two, and these moments all come together to create a poignant thematic tapestry that fits right in with the rest of the franchise while also expanding on its core message. The previous two Sonic films are all about family and friendship, and unsurprisingly, they mainly explore those themes through their protagonists. The first movie sees Sonic find a family in Tom and Maddie, and the second one brings Knuckles and Tails into that fold. So naturally, I was sure this third film would follow the same blueprint with Shadow, but that’s not what happens. Instead, just about everybody–including the two Robotniks and even the henchman Agent Stone–plays into this theme in some overt way, and Shadow’s contribution is very different from what I was expecting. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say that it has more to do with his past than his present, and the movie hammers the point home with a great analogy involving starlight. Admittedly, that probably sounds rather vague, but trust me, it’s actually quite beautiful and touching. It’s sure to hit home with anybody who’s ever lost a loved one, so it’s the cherry on top of this already moving cinematic experience. Along with the rest of the characters and everything they bring to the table, it helps Sonic the Hedgehog 3 handily overcome its narrative weaknesses, so despite those flaws, I’m happy to report that this movie is still an absolute home run.
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Like a lot of Catholics, I’m a big J. R. R. Tolkien fan. I first encountered The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings way back in middle school, and they instantly became some of my favorite novels of all time. Since those formative years, I’ve also read a few of Tolkien’s posthumously-published works, like The Silmarillion and Beren and Lúthien, and of course, I’ve seen all six of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth movies. In fact, I think The Lord of the Rings is the greatest film trilogy ever made, so when I heard about the new animated movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, I couldn’t help but get excited. Sure, Jackson didn’t direct this film (although he is listed as an executive producer!), but I didn’t care. I’m always up for another journey to the magical world of Middle-earth, so I couldn’t wait to see what this new movie had in store.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim was directed by Kenji Kamiyama, and it stars Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, and Miranda Otto. The film takes place almost 200 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, and it recounts a devastating war between Rohan and a neighboring people called the Dunlendings. It all starts when Helm, the king of Rohan, and Freca, the lord of the Dunlendings, get into a fistfight. At first, this brawl looks like it’s going to be a heavyweight battle for the ages, but it ends up being more one-sided than a Goldberg match from the old WCW days. Helm wins the fight with a single punch, but he doesn’t just knock Freca out. He accidentally kills the man, and Freca’s son, Wulf, is devastated. The poor guy can’t do anything about it just yet, but years later, he finally returns to take his revenge. He brings an army with him, and he’s intent on killing Helm and taking the throne for himself. Before we get into the real meat of this review, I have to let you know that The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is very much a stand-alone story, so if you’re not familiar with the world of Middle-earth, don’t fret. You won’t have any trouble following the narrative. Sure, we get a few hints here and there of what’s to come in The Lord of the Rings, and there’s some cool fan service at the end, but none of these moments are terribly important to the movie. They're just fun treats for longtime Tolkien fans, so you don't need to understand the references to enjoy the film. With that out of the way, let’s dive into The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, starting with the visuals. The land and the buildings are brought to life with remarkably realistic 3D animation, but the filmmakers employ a more traditional 2D style for the people and animals. That mismatch creates a jarring look that feels like bad CGI in a live-action movie, and at first, it really grated on me. I simply didn’t believe that these people were actually in this world, so I had a tough time buying into the story. But then something unexpected happened. As the film went on, I found myself so engrossed in the drama and the action that I stopped noticing the hybrid animation style. It’s almost like I was able to see past the medium and directly into the story itself, so it almost didn’t matter how the narrative was brought to life. Granted, I still noticed the odd visuals every now and again, and they still bothered me whenever I did, but thankfully, those moments soon became very few and far between. Moving on to the action, this is the one area where The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is just about perfect. When the movie picks up the pace, it’s absolutely riveting, and there are even a handful of times when it gets surprisingly brutal. For example, we see a couple of limbs get chopped off, and there’s a scene where an arrow gets shot through a guy’s neck. To be fair, these scenes aren’t particularly bloody (although they’re not entirely bloodless either!), so they’re nowhere near as savage as, say, Invincible or the new DC show Creature Commandos. But they add a realistically violent touch that I for one wasn’t expecting in a Lord of the Rings film. Last but not least, we have to talk about the story. As great as the action is, this is the real heart and soul of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. At its core, this is a basic good vs. evil tale with (mostly) clearly drawn moral lines. On one side, Wulf and his crew are the villains, and they become more and more despicable as the war drags on. Wulf ends up being almost pure evil by the time the third act rolls around, so you can’t help but hate him with every fiber of your being. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Hammer and the Rohirrim are the good guys, and in typical Tolkienian fashion, they’re basically paragons of bravery and virtue. These people don’t back down when the evil invaders show up at their doorstep, and even when all hope seems lost, they still keep fighting for what’s right. In fact, the contrast between these two camps is so great that the characters on both sides end up being rather generic. There’s nothing interesting or charming about them beyond their moral standing, so unlike Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies, the whole thing ends up feeling a bit stiff. But despite that big flaw, I still found this almost archetypal battle incredibly inspiring. Wulf’s loathsome actions allowed me to see the ugliness of evil with a stark clarity you don’t always get in modern movies, and the heroes of Rohan made me wish I could fight the evils in our modern world with half their courage and conviction. That’s a great way to feel walking out of a movie, and if you ask me, I’d even say it’s the best compliment you could possibly give a film. Movies can affect us in a lot of ways, but the best thing they can do is inspire us to be better people. And The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim does exactly that. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it manages to overcome its weaknesses and deliver an amazing and moving experience. It’s what The Lord of the Rings should be, so at the end of the day, this movie gets a big thumbs up from me. Have you seen the recent A24 horror movie Heretic? It’s about a pair of Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, who enter the home of a charming older man named Mr. Reed. They think the guy wants to talk to them about their beliefs, but they soon learn that he has something much more sinister in mind.
It’s a really interesting idea for a horror film, but it might leave you with a few questions. Mr. Reed poses some thought-provoking arguments against Christianity, and while Heretic never presents these arguments as definitive, the movie doesn’t definitively refute them either. We just get a few hints of what the Christian response might be, so it’s up to us, the viewers, to flesh these ideas out a bit more. You might even have to do a bit of research to figure out what’s wrong with Mr. Reed’s case against the faith, and I’d like to help you out a bit. Unfortunately, we can’t go through Heretic with a fine-toothed comb in a single article, but let’s take a look at the man's main arguments against Christianity and see just where they go wrong. Plagiarizing the Faith When Heretic moves from Mr. Reed’s living room to his study, the guy uses board games and pop music to argue that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all just different versions of the same basic idea. He compares them to Monopoly–which was plagiarized from an earlier game called The Landlord’s Game–and various pop musicians who’ve been sued for ripping off other people’s songs. Then, in a seemingly irrefutable coup de grâce, the man explains that the story of Jesus is also just another iteration of a story that was around long before the rise of Christianity. History, he says, knows numerous other gods and saviors who allegedly rose from the dead, were born on December 25, or had twelve followers, so the Gospels are essentially just a hodgepodge of these earlier mythologies. Like I said, this argument can be challenging, but if you do a bit of digging, you’ll find that it’s nowhere near as airtight as Mr. Reed makes it out to be. For example, the idea that Christianity is just one of three major iterations of the same basic monotheistic belief isn’t really an argument at all. At best, it’s an irrelevant observation, and at worst, it's just an unproven assertion. Of course Christianity shares similarities with Judaism! The whole point of our faith is that it’s the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people in the Old Testament. See, the Old Testament is essentially a story waiting to be resolved. It tells us that God created a good world, that humanity messed it up, and that God was going to use the people of Israel to fix it. But a problem arose. The Israelites proved to be just as sinful as the rest of humanity, so God found himself in a pickle: he had to restore his wayward people before he could use them to repair our broken world. That’s where the Old Testament ends, and unsurprisingly, it's also where Jesus comes into the picture. He came to restore Israel (that’s why, as he says in Matthew 15:24, he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”) and gather a faithful remnant of Israelites, and after he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, that remnant was finally able to fulfill its vocation and bring his salvation to the rest of the world. So yes, Christianity shares several similarities with Judaism, but those parallels don’t prove anything. The religion of ancient Israel was supposed to give way to something different (even if nobody expected it to be quite this different), so our faith isn’t just a ripoff of Judaism. It’s the long-awaited fulfillment of Judaism. Dying and Rising Gods But what about the second part of Mr. Reed’s argument? When he says the story of Jesus was plagiarized from various pagan mythologies, that’s not just an assertion. It’s an actual argument, and it’s not unique to him. A lot of real-world atheists use it too, so I’m sure some of you have even heard it before. Now, on the surface, this argument seems rock-solid, but like I said before, if you do a bit of digging, you’ll find that it’s little more than smoke and mirrors. As Sister Barnes explains in Heretic, Mr. Reed ignores the numerous differences between Jesus and these other saviors, and she even points one out. She says that one of these figures has, as she so elegantly puts it, “a freaking bird head,” whereas Jesus almost certainly had a normal human head. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you research this argument, you’ll find something shocking: almost all of the evidence for these parallels to the Gospels comes from after the rise of Christianity. So if anything, the line of influence was the other way around. As far as we can tell, it looks like the devotees of these gods borrowed elements of Jesus’ story and incorporated them into their own beliefs. On top of that, if we look closely at the alleged similarities, we’ll see that they’re often not nearly as impressive as they’re made out to be. To take just one example, the Egyptian god Osiris is supposed to have died and risen again just like Jesus, but that’s not actually the case. Yes, he dies in his story, but he doesn’t return to anything resembling a real human life. Rather, he ends up “living” and reigning in the underworld, and if you ask me, that’s not a real resurrection. That’s just a different way of being dead. I could go through a whole host of other supposed parallels that end up being similarly shallow, but you get the point. The evidence doesn’t support Mr. Reed’s theory in Heretic, so once again, his plagiarism argument shows itself to be a theological house of cards. If you just blow on it a tiny bit, the whole thing comes tumbling down. Controlling the Masses Mr. Reed’s last major argument against Christianity is that all religions are simply about control, not truth, and in my opinion, this might be the least persuasive argument of all. Much like the guy’s first main point, this one is also just an unproven assertion, but it’s worse than that. It’s demonstrably false, and the narrative of Heretic bears that out. Mr. Reed tells Sister Paxton that Mormonism dictates every choice she makes, so he always knew exactly what she was going to do. But then something unexpected happens. As the man is making his grand speech, the young missionary stabs him in the neck, proving him wrong. He didn’t see that coming, so it looks like religion isn’t quite as controlling as he thinks it is. And anybody who’s even remotely religious will see a similar dynamic in their own life as well. I’ll use myself as an example. Yes, I’m Catholic, and yes, I believe everything the Church teaches, but the Church doesn’t control me. I’ve freely chosen to believe, and if (hypothetically speaking) I ever choose to leave the faith, I’m free to do that too. Nobody is putting a gun to my head and forcing me to stay Catholic. What’s more, apart from my religious convictions, the Church doesn’t have much of a say in my day-to-day life. Nobody tells me what clothes to wear, what music to listen to, or what movies to watch, so to say that my religion controls me is pretty laughable. The Power of Prayer Last but not least, we have to talk about an argument that comes from a surprising source. At the end of Heretic, as Sister Paxton and Mr. Reed lie nearly dying on the basement floor, Sister Paxton reveals that she doesn’t actually believe in the power of prayer. She says the issue was once the subject of a scientific study, but the researchers found that prayer has no effect on people’s recovery from illness. However, despite her unbelief, the woman prays anyway, and surprisingly, her prayer is answered. Sister Barnes, who we previously thought was dead, rises up and saves her friend from Mr. Reed’s last-ditch effort to kill her, and then she slumps to the floor and finally dies. It’s a bittersweet end to this harrowing adventure, and it provides a thrilling narrative response to Sister Paxton’s unexpected skepticism. But Heretic is just a movie, not real life, so how can Catholics respond to her argument against the effectiveness of prayer? The easy answer is to point to prayers we’ve seen God answer, but I don’t think that’s enough. Unless we’ve been given genuine miracles, skeptics can always say that our prayers had nothing to do with it, so we need to deal with the argument more directly. And to do that, we have to understand something about prayer. God is a person, not a vending machine, so prayer isn’t a mechanical process that can be studied scientifically. God doesn’t answer us simply because we say the right words or perform the right ritual, and he’s definitely not a lab rat that performs on command. He only gives us what we want when he knows it’ll lead us closer to him, so prayer doesn’t really lend itself to this kind of scientific inquiry. Grappling Tools If you’ve seen Heretic, you know I’ve only scratched the surface in this article. Like many great films, this one raises more questions than anybody can answer in a single sitting, so it would take an entire book (at least!) to thoroughly examine the fascinating debate between Mr. Reed and his Mormon guests. I simply hope I’ve given you the tools you need to begin grappling with these weighty questions yourself, and if I’ve done that, I’ll count this as a success. |
Jp Nunezis a longtime film buff and theology nerd with master's degrees in theology and philosophy from Franciscan University of Steubenville. His favorite movie genres are horror, superheroes, and giant monsters. ArchivesCategories |
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