The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

by Remington Gonser

Photo: Illumination Nintendo

Directors: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc & Fabien Polack
Starring: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy & Charlie Day 
Rated: PG
Runtime: 1 hour & 38 minutes

 
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is a fun video game film with plenty of references for fans and a better story than the first film.
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The first Illumination Mario film was a very adequate film for what it was. Tons of references, a fine but baseline plot, and a lot of scenes that are interesting to look at. Where it fell flat for me was the soundtrack (I know, “unpopular” opinion), the sense of humor that felt too tongue-in-cheek and what I can only describe as a lack of passion. This film improves upon these issues.

The story starts right off with a little more pizzazz than the last one. We get a quick setup of “this is the villain, this is what they’re doing, aaaaaaaand go!” Although this intro has a very similar setup to the first film, I think they put a little more elbow grease into this opening.

I think with them being able to skip Mario’s whole “I’m a loser” arc that we saw in the first film, we got a lot more room to play with fun stuff. That being said, we did kind of gloss over some things throughout the film. There were a few plot points that were set up and executed, but they kind of just … didn’t have a lot of weight to them. Yeah - this big thing happened, but let’s move right on to the next thing. Pacing is overall the funk of this film - we bebop around reeeeal quick, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a good time.

Life-long dweeb/dork has a smile on his face for most of the video game movie… fork found in the kitchen. I did genuinely enjoy this movie. It was a lot of fun - especially for the fans. Tons of Easter eggs and references for Nintendo fans are littered throughout this film. I do worry for fandom franchises in the future with this - I don’t want things to become reference slop. If you hurl a million “wink winks” at me, I’m going to get bored with them. However, I don’t feel like that’s the case for this film at all. Even some of the references have underlying references that I could point my giant man finger at and say, “I understand this!” It also takes some characters who don’t have much in-game backstory and zhuzhes them up to be a little more interesting. I was very interested, and I had a great time.

Passion is a word that is thrown around a lot with media. Do I think the creators of this film were passionate about the source material - almost. Do I feel like the weight of Illumination’s thumb was still present from the first film - not as much. I don’t think you can have a movie like this with this many nods to past media and say that there wasn’t any passion behind it… However, there is still that feeling of something missing. You can eat a cake and think it’s delicious while also saying, “I think this was missing something.” I mean - look at the ‘Sonic’ films (woah Mario v Sonic discourse in the big ‘26). You can look at those films and those actors and the team and say, “Whoa - these people really like Sonic.” There’s just energy around it. From hiring fan-favorite artists to redesign your characters to hiring writers from the comics and games to assist you in making the story - the ‘Sonic’ films have done a lot of things right. For Mario, we don’t have any modern comics to pull lore or references from, but we also didn’t have to worry about the design or plot too much because Nintendo would never let Illumination mess with their mascot too much. We also had Shigeru Miyamoto on as a producer - Mario’s figurative father figure in the eyes of many. I do think a lot of passion went into this film. I really do, but there was still that mark that wasn’t hit directly. We’re inching closer and closer, but we haven’t hit it head-on … yet! I have high hopes for the next Nintendo Animated Film. I think we’re heading in a more correct direction after this film.