Seeing the title revealed for the first time. Watching those early trailers. Finding out about Donald Glover’s Yoshi casting. Laughing about and then spending AUD $45 on a novelty popcorn bucket that I’ll never put popcorn in. Glen Powell is playing who? These are the things that will stick with me about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, far more than the film itself.
The ritual of jumping on a Melbourne tram headed into the CBD, having booked opening day tickets to see it on an IMAX screen as soon as they went on sale. This is what movie magic is to me. The potential for a 99-minute collection of a couple hundred thousand frames, arranged in the order of a story, to bring together hundreds of strangers in one room – each with their own hopes, expectations, reservations for what they’re about to be shown.
Which is all a clumsily-said, unnecessary lead in to say: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is totally fine.
The film firmly signals its intentions early on in a scene that happens right toward the beginning, just after we’ve been given our first look at Princess Rosalina and her family of adopted Lumas, and witnessed their lives upended by a surprise visit from Bowser Jr.
Switching from this cold open, we see the Mario Bros. themselves riding motorbikes lifted straight from the Mario Kart series across the deserts of the Sand Kingdom and to the town of Tostarena, first seen in 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey. The town’s citizens have called on the pair of plumbers to search out a mysterious pipe blockage inside their Inverted Pyramid, which will soon turn out to be our first encounter with Yoshi. With nothing but darkness inside the pyramid, Mario and Luigi break out a couple of the familiar Fire Flower power-ups and transform into Fire Mario and Luigi. This way, they can create fireballs in their palms and carry them around as very minor and fragile sources of light.
What we learn from this scene is that, despite having just ridden in on highly-engineered bikes that feature prominent headlights, and thus clearly having ready access to genuinely useful technology like – I don’t know, torches – it’s much more important that the audience is shown something Mario. Because why else would you be here? And the thing is, I agree! This is exactly why I’m here. Not to be enlightened, but engaged. To turn to my partner and raise both of my eyebrows in just the particular way to silently say, “They did that!”
This early pace, where we’re transported from one loosely connected scene to the next, barely holding onto an already-razor-thin narrative thread that can be boiled down to “Bowser’s jerk kid joins the family’s princess kidnapping business,” is how the remainder of the film unfolds. Every new turn an excuse to go a place in the wider Mario-verse and play iSpy: Nintendo Reference Edition for a few minutes before moving onto the next. Some locations and events are lifted wholesale from the Super Mario Galaxy games, others pull from games across the series’ history in an effort to stuff as many references and gags in as possible.
At one point Princess Peach and Toad turn up to a gravity-defying underworld casino (one that would’ve earned an R18+ rating from the Australian Ratings Board if it was actually in a game), and clash with a bunch of the bosses from Super Mario Bros. 2. I saw the film last night and already genuinely couldn’t tell you why the story goes here or what the conclusion of the ensuing action scene was, but the memory of Wart (played by the eminent Luis Guzmán), Birdo, Mouser and Clawgrip rendered in cutting-edge CG, after having last seen most of them decades ago in the most primitive of graphics, is worth far more than the context.
By the time an hour has rolled by, I almost feel like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is testing me. “You think you know Nintendo?” it taunts, self-assured that it knows far more Nintendo than I do. In one sweeping shot of a city, a hologram of the iconic, 3D “N” from the Nintendo 64 logo adorns a skyscraper. That’s the Easy Mode, there’s plenty of that. Later on there’s a whole bit that riffs on Super Mario Maker, which is about equal to the occasional musical motif or repurposed Nintendo peripheral in tapping into more specific memories and experiences. The post-session conversations with friends and social media posting will no doubt have a far longer tail than anything that actually happens to the characters in the film.
When Fox McCloud arrives, played by The Running Man and Scream Queens’ Glen Powell, it initiates conversations about the state of the Star Fox games, about how cool it would be to see that series come back. When even more characters from outside of the immediate Mario canon turn up – I won’t say who – it begs questions about Nintendo and Illumination’s future cinematic aspirations. But at almost no point does it ever mean anything to the film I’m actively watching.
But I’m still having a good time! It’s a lovely thing to look at, for sure, with far more visual variety and even sharper production than The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Criticisms have been taken to heart, so things like the first film’s woefully out-of-place licensed music have been set aside in favour of more faithful Mario tunes, which is an easy win but a win nonetheless. The new additions to the cast are universally pretty great, including the casting of Donald Glover as a completely traditional, non-verbal Yoshi, a choice that is either hilariously self-aware or a chilling reminder of how far we’ve walked down a dark path. I can’t tell.
It’s a comparison steeped in cliche, but The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a junk food movie. It’s something to be consumed, not considered. Great for a night out with young kids or drunk friends, but not exactly enriching. It’s best not to be too dour about what is, at its core, a movie made for children, but there’s a wealth of more nourishing films out there for them, too.
Great
- Beautiful visuals bring Mario worlds to life
- A vastly better, more game-worthy score
- Some truly fun deep-cut characters and gags
- New blood on the voice cast are all killing it
Not great
- Overly preoccupied with showing the audience cool things
- Barely-there plot makes it difficult to care about any of the stakes