The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hits theaters on April 1.
Illumination, the folks who brought you those sweet little yellow hench-dudes, is back with their second crack at one of the most iconic video game franchises of all time, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Their first Super Mario Bros. Movie was a real lesson in simple and efficient adaptation, but that’s a job that gets tougher when you expand from World to a Galaxy.
The great, and sometimes terrible, thing about adapting something truly beloved to the big screen is that it has the potential to be just as good a movie as it was in a different form. The trick in re-skinning these iconic books or comics or video games or whatever they were before they became movies is figuring out what made them popular in the first place and focusing on that. There’s no small amount of pressure in that decision. It’s an important one, the most important one in fact because if you get it wrong nothing else in the movie is going to work.
To that end, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie focuses squarely on all the stuff. This movie is packed wall-to-wall with Easter eggs and references and what seems like every character Nintendo as a company has ever dreamed up and rendered as, at minimum, 8-bit sprites. In fact, there are entire locations in this movie, crowded and bustling spots we didn’t get to see in the first film, that are used as devices for dropping countless characters on screen as blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos.
The look of the movie should make even the casual, old-school Mario fans happy as well. There are design elements with built-in, story-based reasons for existing that organically call up the original NES game’s side-scrolling look, even down to the 8-bit animation. The way Bryan Tyler’s score riffs on practically every iconic piece of music Mario Bros. games have ever featured is a cheat code to me grinning. There’s even a little nod to the 1993 film with a pair of characters travelling through a weird little digital wall and arriving in a clearly Blade Runner-inspired world on the other side. All the bases are covered where the references and Easter eggs and subtle-nods to hyper-specific corners of the Mario games are concerned.
And that’s cool! There were a handful of moments that had me saying, “Oh hey, look, it’s that guy! I remember beating that level when I was a kid!” out loud in the theater, probably annoying the guy sitting next to me. So that level of this video game adaptation is cleared. Job well done. But the Princess of making a truly good movie is in another castle.
Yes, Illumination, directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, writer Matthew Fogel and everybody else on the creative team made a fun-to-look-at collection of Mario’s greatest hits, but all of those bells and whistles just make a movie OK. Those are the things that show a pedigree, that the creators have done their homework and we can trust them with a brand and a bunch of characters that we care about.
But what you need to make a movie better than that is, quite simply, something to care about. There’s not traditionally a ton of story with Super Mario Bros. There’s lore of course, but nothing that you can really directly adapt into a whole movie. What was so savvy about The Super Mario Bros. Movie from 2023 was that underneath the Rainbow Roads and Kong Armies was a story about two brothers out to prove themselves as worth a damn, to prove all the doubters wrong and stick together while they’re doing it. It’s a simple and relatable (overly-familiar even) story we’ve all seen a hundred times, but it should be when you’re pipe-warping to the Mushroom Kingdom to fight a fire-breathing turtle. When those are the stakes, stick with an emotional plot we can get behind and not ask too many questions about, and just re-skin it as a Mario Bros. story. There’s a built-in connection to all audiences there, dressed up as a classic video game by people who clearly love it. That’s what carried the 2023 movie, but that’s also what’s very much missing in this one.
Yes of course there is a plot in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and it’s one that ought to have an emotional weight to it. Bowser Jr. wants to rescue his father and he wants to do it in an impressive way. In the process, the entire web of characters gets pulled together in a way that, from an A to B to C story point of view, makes sense. Mario and Luigi obviously have their history with Bowser that they need to move on from, Peach finds another adventure to go on that might give her answers about her past, Bowser himself deals with some issues he has with the type of father he was to Bowser Jr., and so on.
Any one of those dynamics could’ve done the trick, but the film is so crowded. None of those relationships have a chance to stand out from the others, and as a result, the movie doesn’t really give you a reason to care. Even a burgeoning, aww-shucks romance between Mario and Peach is brought up and forgotten. Toad actually says it best when he’s first introduced to Yoshi: “Some dinosaur shows up and he’s just part of the team now?”
Yeah, Toad, unfortunately that’s just going to be how it works with this sequel. This is the biggest challenge with expanding something like this. You risk missing out on some of the characters that were great the first go round in favor of tacking on the new ones. There’s just not enough room. I wanted more Donkey Kong, but instead I got a little bit of Rosalina.
It’s a double-edged sword, this movie. On the one hand, all of those Mario references are exactly what the movie needs, but on the other hand, there’s no focus to them and that issue even intrudes on the story as well. There are a few scenes that feel lifted straight out of other movies, one in particular that’s an obvious riff on two very popular animated movies rolled into one. It gives the impression that sequences were reverse-engineered to fit the references in as opposed to figuring out how to get the references to work organically in the story, but when other films have done it recently and, frankly, better, the strategy can backfire.
To get back to some positives for a moment, I will also say that the action is actually pretty good. This is something that Illumination really excels at. The Despicable Me series, Minions included, has some of the wildest animated action set pieces, and the fight scenes here are genuinely fun. Peach and Toad kicking ass in the casino feels closer to The Matrix sequels than a kids movie. The first encounter with Bowser Jr. has some three-against-one wuxia flavor to it as well. This fight is so intricate, in fact, that I found myself wondering how a guy who was just a plumber a few years ago got so good at fisticuffs. It obviously didn’t ruin the experience for me but it got dangerously close to exemplifying what happens when there’s no story to care about. If those are the threads you want to pull on, then you are not a fan of the movie.
Ultimately, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie suffers through the same pitfalls that a lot of sequels do, even though successful franchising is kind of Illumination’s whole deal, as most of their movies have at least one sequel. This one definitely gets bigger, as a good sequel ought to do. But if the title of The Super Mario Bros. Movie indicates a movie about the sibling plumbers, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie tells us this movie is about everything else. In the balancing act of working in every bit of Mario that fans might expect, while grounding the story in something relatable and worth caring about, the filmmakers leaned more towards the former.
Again, that’s not without its charm. Even the custom Illumination logo before the movie starts is an original Donkey Kong reference starring the Minions. They got me in a good mood before the lights were even all the way dimmed. And that’s what I meant when I started this review talking about the great and terrible potential inherent in these movies. The fact that this group of filmmakers clearly knows and loves the Mario Galaxy is great. The issue is that charm alone is what saves this movie from being really forgettable.
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