REVIEW: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ is too weighed down by its plot
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, featuring the voices of Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Donald Glover.
Are Mario games just for kids? They definitely skew younger than most of the AAA titles that get released each year. But when they get adapted into movies by animation studios like Illumination (of Minions fame), they’re intended as big, “four-quadrant” movies. That’s the industry term for the kind of all-ages release that earns a billion dollars at the box office without blinking an eye. They succeed by harnessing the nostalgia adult audiences have for a now 40-year-old game franchise, many of whom happen to have kids they can bring along.
The first of Illumination’s Mario adaptations was a big hit in 2023, when it joined several other recent game-to-screen projects to prove that the “video game curse” in movies and TV could be overcome; it all came down to having the right script and the right creative team. Now the company has re-teamed with Nintendo for a follow-up, based on Super Mario Galaxy, a beloved duo of Mario platformer games originally released for the Wii in 2007 and 2010.
I’m probably among the ideal adult audience members for a movie based on those games. I recently played through both Galaxy re-releases for Nintendo Switch, so I was primed for any of the visual references the studio would include. And visuals are definitely where The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is at its strongest. But no matter how ready I was to see games I knew so well get blown up on a big screen, the movie struggles on a story level at every turn. The script gestures at themes involving long-separated siblings and estranged fathers and sons, but barely resolves any of them. I’m not even sure we get a sequence where the villains notice their plans have been foiled.
Rosalina (voiced by Brie Larson) is the princess in need of saving.
To be fair, as renowned as the Galaxy games are for their gameplay mechanics, the story is not the highlight. It’s the usual Mario framework of rescuing Princess Peach, as a way of setting up the progression between different themed levels. So the fact that Illumination even had a rough outline with dialogue and character dynamics sets it ahead of the games. But an incomplete story is far more noticeable in a movie than it is in a game; at least in a game, you’re distracted by being in control. As hard as Illumination works to include tributes to the side-scrolling, obstacle-defying nature of Mario, none of those sequences fill the void of meaning in the movie’s core.
We catch up with Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) after they’ve become truly at home in the Mushroom Kingdom. They deal with day-to-day threats against the fungal Toads who make up the citizenry, and one of their missions introduces them to the chameleon-tongued dinosaur Yoshi, voiced in a very Vin Diesel-as-Groot fashion by Donald Glover. Meanwhile, out in space, Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson), a guardian of the cosmos, is kidnapped by Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) to use her magic to power a doomsday device, all to impress his dad, Bowser (Jack Black). Another day, another princess to save.
One of Illumination’s tweaks to the format is to make Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) a far more active participant in both movies. In the first film, she trains Mario in all the physical skills he needs to navigate Bowser’s traps and minions. Now, she leaves Mario and Luigi alone to kingdom-sit while she seeks out Rosalina. Meanwhile, Rosalina is also shown to be an adept fighter and magic wielder — but is soon locked up and in need of a rescue. It’s a noble intention to have the princesses be as capable as the heroic plumbers, but beyond the action scenes, there’s not much else to talk about. The characters (Mario and Luigi included) don’t have much in the way of an inner life or motivations beyond the plot. There are a few suggestions that Mario has unrequited feelings for Peach, a concept teased throughout the games but never developed, and the movies aren’t really interested in it either. Maybe it’s that the breakneck pace of the action leaves no room for emotion, or maybe it’s just that Nintendo forbids any potentially messy romance being associated with their prized intellectual property (the Legend of Zelda series has the same flaw). Whatever the explanation, there’s little to grasp hold of beyond sight gags and Easter eggs.
Boswer Jr. (Benny Safdie) is the main villain this time around.
The set pieces are deftly executed, but as a fan of the source material, the gravity-based puzzles that define the Galaxy games needed more of a focus. It might have been more fun to watch Mario or Peach try to figure out, with trial and error, how to use zero-gravity or a planet-hopping mechanic to get from A to B. I would love to see one of the characters rage quit because they keep failing to collect enough of those dang purple coins…IYKYK.
I have to assume that the studio has more of these in the tank. There are decades’ worth of Mario games to draw from, and Nintendo separately has a live-action adaptation of Zelda in post-production, so the game giant’s cinematic aspirations are clearly in full flight. As it stands, though, there’s still lots of untapped potential. Illumination can obviously make a functional movie out of this material (which was an achievement compared to the first effort in 1993), but can they make a good one? Can they develop the characters beyond the rigid rubrics that govern their game appearances, or would that run afoul of Nintendo’s infamously conservative attitudes? The next time around, I’m not sure if my fandom will get me through.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
My favourite character was easily Fox McCloud, but that might be just because it’s been too long since we got a straight-up Star Fox game. I would pay money for an anime spinoff about Fox, in the style of his intro sequence here.
There are a few callouts to Super Mario Odyssey in this film, mostly in the opening desert scene and the jazzy music cue in the casino. Will that game be the focus of a third film?
This thing is cinematic junk food, but it still feels more nourishing than The Minecraft Movie.