‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ Is about as Soulless as IP Blockbuster Filmmaking Gets

Illumination Entertainment doesn’t make good movies. They make highly successful movies that typically gross around a billion dollars at the global box office, but they’ve never been synonymous with quality. Watching The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I imagine a variation of the phrase “How do we maximize the brand?” gets thrown a lot during story meetings. It’s a film that tries to cram in a lot of Mario stuff but has total indifference to telling a worthwhile story or crafting a single character. For all of the meticulously detailed animation and set pieces (and the movie is mostly set pieces), there’s an underlying disdain for the audience, assuming they have no attention spans beyond the next Easter egg or explosion. Young viewers and longtime Mario fans deserve so much better than this hollow excuse for a movie.

Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) has been kidnapped by Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie), who wants to reunite with his dad (Jack Black), who’s currently miniaturized and imprisoned in the Mushroom Kingdom. One of Rosalina’s “kids” (adorable little star creatures) escapes and tells Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) of Rosalina’s abduction, and so Peach and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) set off to rescue her while leaving Mario (Chris Pratt), Luigi (Charlie Day), and their new pal Yoshi (Donald Glover) in charge. But their stewardship is short-lived when Bowser Jr. comes to rescue his dad, and the crew must reunite with Peach and Toad.

None of this actually matters, as what semblance there is of a plot feels like it was hastily drawn on a whiteboard in an afternoon. Characters go places, and we’re left wondering, in a movie with the word “galaxy” in its title, how anyone pinpoints the location of another person. Everyone just easily manages to find each other, and there’s no question of how that happened. Nor is any conflict bigger than a single set piece. When Peach wants information on where to find Rosalina, she goes to a casino world populated by villains and led by the bad guys from Super Mario Bros. 2. There’s a big fight scene; she gets what she wants and moves on.

I hate to hold up the previous Mario movie as an improvement, but it’s Shakespeare compared to this one. At least on that effort, the writers tried to craft a zero-to-hero narrative for Mario and gave Bowser some funny motivations in trying to woo Peach. The sequel is nothing. There’s a hint that Mario has a crush on Peach, but that’s not developed. Introducing Yoshi is to introduce Yoshi, not to create new conflict or change the dynamic among the characters. Bowser hints at having reformed, but then ditches that when the story needs him to assist the malevolent Bowser Jr. The movie’s prime goal is to discard anything that makes sense if it gets to the next Easter-egg-fueled set piece.

For example, when the gang crash-lands on a planet, it’s because Bowser Jr. used a Super Scope (a 1992 Super Nintendo peripheral that was only compatible with 12 games) to hit Mario and Luigi with a magic beam that renders them into babies. They’re babies because that’s what they were in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, where Yoshis had to carry the babies around on their backs. In the movie, Yoshi now carries baby Mario and Luigi as they attempt to outrun the dinosaur that you could control in Super Mario Odyssey. If your brain is leaking out of your ears after reading that, I don’t blame you. It’s a scene that’s more focused on referencing as much Nintendo stuff as possible while likely befuddling anyone who isn’t well-versed in Mario’s history.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy to write a story based on Mario because the games typically don’t have deep narratives. But that’s the challenge you have to address, and while genuinely creative people have shown it's possible with films like The LEGO Movie and Barbie, Illumination is, as always, happy to phone it in. I do wonder if I’m the weirdo for asking to care about the characters in a Mario movie, but then I remember, no! They’re making ostensibly a narrative-based family film, not some experimental piece of cinema. Illumination simply does not care about telling a good story. I’m sure if you asked the filmmakers what the movie was about, they would likely say, “family,” since there’s the stuff with Bowser and Bowser Jr., as well as Peach learning about her past. But if you followed that question up with, “What exactly about family?” it would be impossible to answer because there’s not a single coherent thought or character here. Rather than making the audience cheer because a character grew or changed in some notable way, the film wants applause because Fox McCloud (Glen Powell) from the Star Fox games shows up.

None of this makes Mario Mario, let alone a decent movie. There are a few brief glimpses of a much stronger film, like Mario and Luigi’s day running the Mushroom Kingdom, which is an amusing montage of them solving problems from defeating hammer brothers to gifting a citizen a new scoop of ice cream. There’s the occasional good joke (usually involving Bowser) and even a terrific anime-style recap of Fox’s backstory. But these feel like good ideas that snuck through the demands of piling on chase scenes and fight sequences that also have Easter eggs. It’s like Illumination and Nintendo are eager to just get on to the inevitable Super Smash Bros. movie that can sell so many more toys. And yet, for all the references, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie can cram into the frame, Illumination still doesn’t understand that creating a sense of joy is more than just dropping in Easter eggs and calling it a day. 

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opens in theaters on April 1^st.