The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Has A Big Sky But No Shining Stars

Look. When I studied digital animation, my alma mater actually put a decent amount of resources into teaching us storytelling on top of the technical stuff. We learned things. Things about how stories work, and how much of the medium is the respectful control of people's attention leading to an emotional payoff. 

I like Formula 1. Mika Hakkinen is great, and I wanna be friends with him. 

This is what it felt like watching The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. 

It's Not Casablanca But That Doesn't Mean Just Being Blanca Is OK 

When the first Super Mario Bros movie announced it was being worked on by Illumination, I tensed up at the thought of it. I like the culture around Illumination, but I don't care for their mascot-heavy approach to animation. The Illumination catalogue can best be defined by a the Lorax- a harrowing story watered down to a bunch of cute animals acting outrageously and, for some reason, Taylor Swift. 

Surprisingly, Super Mario Bros. overcame my bias against Illumination to be a perfectly reasonable movie. It's not an all-time great narrative, sure. But it made good use of its big-name cast and got a hearty chuckle out of me. 

It turns out that Shigeru Miyamoto had frame-trapped me, making me feel safe in my defense before hitting me with whatever Super Mario Galaxy was. It's a movie that feels unfocused, as if every individual scene was fully produced in a vacuum, and in the last few months suddenly realized that they had to stitch it together. Worse still, it does this by actively shoving aside all the things that worked from the first movie. 

Mario spends the whole movie apparently holding the script just off camera, as all his dialogue is just him telegraphing where the scene goes next. Jack Black sounds like he recorded his lines on Fiverr, as he spends the whole movie never actually having a conversation with anyone. He just kind of says things and other characters react to it, and he's got no one to play off of in that way that makes him so charming. 

Heck, Toad doesn't even say anything interesting, either. Between Charlie Day, Jack Black and Keegan Michael-Key you think there'd be some kind of magic going. After all, Luigi and Bowser had pretty good chemistry in the first movie, and Toad was one of the best uses of Illumination-style mascot humor. And yet, zilch,. Nada. I get it, you don't want to re-tread old material but I mean, surely you give your top billing actors something. So much of this movie is just kind of mindlessly drifting from beat to beat that I'm wondering who did get meaningful screentime. It wasn't Rosalina, it wasn't Peach, and it definitely wasn't Mario or Bowser. 

None of these characters really have anywhere to go emotionally. The movie starts with the typical kids movie sequel beat of "How will Mario confess his feelings to Peach?" then doesn't do anything with it. The ending feels like the theme was supposed to be about the power of a sibling bond but forgot to run a throughline throughout the movie. It's sad because the first movie actually did a decent job at that- meanwhile Galaxy has all its charisma sucked into the vacuum of space.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Verdict

Super Mario Galaxy is a movie that feels like it was designed with iPad babies in mind. My mistake was paying attention during the movie- I noticed that the scene transitions felt janky, or that Mario was wholly one-dimensional all movie. Maybe if I had been browsing Reels or swiping on Tinder I'd have been kinder to what I watched. I'd have annoyed the other people in the cinema, but maybe the anger they'd feel at the piercing blue light of my phone rejecting yet another ideologically incompatible girl would have been more rewarding than whatever was  on the screen. 

It's frustrating because somewhere in the mess, there's bits of a genuinely fun kids movie here. Bowser spends the first half of the movie acting as a Performative Male as he apparently struggles with wanting to be reformed vs being naturally drawn to breaking and destroying things. Meanwhile, new characters like Fox McCloud have the same magic that the first movie had as he steals every scene he's in. It's not just that this is probably the most Starfox we're going to get this decade, he's just a genuinely fun character to have on screen. 

But between boring action scenes that seem to have been pre-designed then over-multiplied to an almost grotesque level of "did you get it" fanservice, Super Mario Galaxy feels like it's banking all its goodwill on people who were on their phones during its runtime, and leave the cinema with nothing more in their head than "I liked it when I recognized the thing". It's a children's movie pandering to the worst kind of adult- either an insufferable Nintendo Adult or a phone addict with an internal monologue that sounds like TikTok TTS. 

That being said, it's a pretty movie. Those setpieces will make great YouTube clips when it comes to digital, and if you don't like certain scenes you will be able to jump around them with the film having just as much cohesion. On the plus side, it feels like the entire team who worked on this movie had picked up Mario Odyssey on sale between the pre production phases of the first movie and this one. Good for them, that's a good game. 

Super Mario Galaxy now showing in cinemas.