I guess I should start by saying there’s going to be spoilers, duh. Not like it matters though, as you’ll see soon.
First I’ll talk about the score. It was great. There were a lot of references and musical nods and it was fun to catch them all. I like how they didn’t really use that much licensed music either. That’s all I’ll say about it for now because it connects to a bigger issue with the movie that I’ll talk about later. The animation was also about what I’d expect, and I enjoyed the sprite work whenever it showed up. They clearly put effort into it. The voice acting was good too. Notably, I got used to Bowser Jr.’s voice after a while, it wasn’t as jarring as people were saying it was when it was first revealed.
But now, I’ll talk about… the plot. This is where the movie really falls apart. Honestly, calling it a “plot” is being a little too generous. Rosalina gets kidnapped by Bowser Jr., Peach finds out and goes to save her. That’s basically it. Of course other things do happen, but overall, the plot is basically non existent.
A huge problem with the plot is the terrible pacing. After watching the movie, I checked to see how long it was and was shocked to find out it was 1 hour and 39 minutes long because it felt way shorter than that. The plot points get no time to develop because everything is moving at a mile a minute, and the end result is that every character is as flat as a sheet of paper.
Let’s just go over the important ones so you can see what I mean. Mario? He’s in love with Peach but doesn’t think she’ll ever go out with a plumber. At the end of the movie she gives him a kiss, which is cute and all, but he hasn’t really done anything in this movie that was that much more impressive than the first movie. So what made her suddenly reciprocate his feelings? Next is Luigi. He’s just there. At the beginning of the movie he’s a coward like in the games, and this proceeds to never be brought up again despite all the situations they find themselves in that you’d think would have someone like him scared ****less. Peach? She finds out Rosalina is her sister but they don’t really go anywhere with that plot point. It’s not nearly as emotional as it should be when they reunite. Rosalina? Damsel in distress who cares about her Lumas. That’s it. That’s all they do with the only character who actually has a personality in the mainline platformers. Toad? He doesn’t like Yoshi at first, then he, for some reason, suddenly realizes Yoshi is goated and drops his grudge. Speaking of which, Yoshi? He’s just there for marketing purposes. But it’s Yoshi and he’s voiced by Childish Gambino of all people, I literally can’t say anything bad about this. Bowser Jr? He really likes his dad and looks up to him. They barely talk about the fact that he hasn’t seen him in years. Bowser? Shockingly, he actually does have something resembling a character arc. When Mario hits him to undo the effects of the Mini Mushroom (and tiny (get it?) nitpick, but that’s not how the power up works. If you get hit with a Mini Mushroom, you’d just die, just like if you were hit without a power up), he joins their team, even deciding to take one for the team so that they could go to Gateway Galaxy. After Bowser Jr. gets him off of Honeyhive Galaxy, he finds himself at odds with the heroes, and feels bad because he sincerely cares about them, until Bowser Jr. reminds him that friends are bad and you can only rely on family. This is enough to make him stop caring about them. And finally, Fox… wait, what the hell is Fox doing in this movie?
Oh right, I guess I should talk about that. The references. [insert Ian Flynn joke of choice here]. So, at first, I really enjoyed this aspect of the movie. The music, background details, the characters, etc. They were fun to spot. But after a while, it was hard not to feel like they were just making references to Mario and Nintendo games for the sake of it. Like they just want fans to point at the screen and say “they said ‘do a barrel roll!’ or “omg they’re using the Wart boss theme!” and just have that be the whole movie. And it was super forced sometimes too. Again, literally why was Fox here? And why does he do more cool stuff than Rosalina? You can’t just expect references to carry an entire movie, there has to be actual substance outside of it. And unfortunately, this movie doesn’t really have that besides a lot of action scenes.
And, for something called the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, you would expect it to heavily reference Super Mario Galaxy, no? Well, there’s some musical nods like Enter Bowser Jr., Gusty Garden Galaxy (obviously), and, in the credits, Melty Molten Galaxy. They have Rosalina, her storybook, the observatory, the Lumas, and Megaleg. We go to what is presumably Honeyhive Galaxy for a few minutes, and the heroes visit in name only versions of Gateway Galaxy and Space Junk Galaxy. There’s shooting stars at the beginning of the movie, Peach’s Castle gets lifted into the air at some point… yeah, that’s about it. It’s not a grand adventure across space like the game was, and that’s really disappointing. I’m fine with them making new galaxies, even ones taking cues from exiting galaxies, but it’s just not as epic as it should be, nor does it really have that much to do with space. The plot is still just mostly Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Toad, Peach, and Fox getting into wacky shenanigans on their way to rescue Rosalina. And as a Mario Galaxy “adaptation,” this is extremely underwhelming. I don’t even understand why they bothered to name it what they did. It’s basically false advertising. Oh wait, I know why they did it. If they name the movie after the most popular Mario game and announce it when said game and its sequel are being rereleased on Switch, they’ll make more money and generate more hype. Of course. Whatever.
I feel like I’ve been kind of harsh, so I want to just say that I didn’t actually hate this movie. It was kind of enjoyable when I turned my brain off, stopped thinking critically, and just started searching for every reference I could find, and I can’t bring myself to hate it. The people behind this really seem like a bunch of super excited, passionate Mario fans and I can tell they had a lot of fun making the movie. But I also can’t say this was a good movie. It makes sense that it got the critical reception it did because you’re not going to enjoy this unless you’re a huge Mario fan or video game nerd . By comparison, Sonic movies are good on their own merits and I could easily recommend them to someone who hasn’t played a Sonic game before. In fact, it’s not that uncommon to find people who had no experience with the franchise, watched the movies, and instantly became fans. This movie isn’t like that. Based on the post credits scene, there’s clearly going to be a third movie, and I really, really hope they actually try with that movie’s plot because if it somehow manages to turn out worse than this movie did, I think I might genuinely end up hating it. Or maybe I’m just coping and they won’t learn their lesson because this movie is going to make millions in the box office. I guess you can expect me to make a Super Mario Movie 3 review when I’m in college.
And also, I’m really sick of the way people who did like the movie are defending it. The idea that “it’s for kids, of course the plot’s going to be simple” and “Mario isn’t known for its deep and compelling story, why did you expect anything different from the movie?” First of all, “for kids” should not be an excuse to not bother with the plot. There are plenty of kids’ movies that have good stories. Like the aforementioned Sonic movies. And secondly, Mario games have proven to be capable of telling good stories. Just look at most of the RPGs. But even though most of the mainline platformers have excuse plots, that’s only because they’re video games and have fun gameplay, so no one really cares. This is a movie. There isn’t anything to carry it but the plot. If you like this movie, that’s fine, it would be really stupid for me to say you aren’t allowed to enjoy it, I just think this is a bad defense.
But this movie has Yoshi in it, so I think that means all of my complaints are just automatically invalidated and I have to just give it a 10 out of 10.
