Review: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE HEEN WARNED!]

I won’t beat around the bush: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie isn’t particularly good. Video games are already notoriously difficult to adapt—the medium is, after all, inherently interactive, a quality that cinema simply cannot replicate—and the folks at Illumination Entertainment make basically every wrong creative choice imaginable. The film lacks any semblance of a cohesive narrative structure, prioritizing spectacular set pieces, gratuitous cameos, and the studio’s trademark “cute factor” (“It’s so fluffy!”) over conflict, theme, and characterization. Subplots are abundant—Peach’s desire to discover her forgotten past, Bowser’s efforts to reconnect with his estranged son, Mario’s insecurities regarding his romantic prospects (“Do you really think a princess could fall in love with a plumber?”)—but they all feel underdeveloped due to the story’s relentless pace. Even Yoshi’s much anticipated presence seems purely perfunctory; he just kind of shows up in the opening scene and proceeds to stick around because… well, the writers were obliged to pay off the previous installment’s post-credits tease somehow, right? And don’t get me started on the frequent attempts to tug at the audience’s heartstrings, which consistently come off as insincere, emotionally manipulative, and excessively sentimental.

I am, however, not entirely immune to shallow fan service. Fox McCloud plays a brief but integral role in this movie, and as soon as he arrived (complete with his own stylish 2D-animated intro sequence), I was eight-years-old again—kneeling way too close to my CRT TV, clutching the unwieldy N64 controller (equipped, of course, with the Rumble Pak, which vibrated in tandem with every polygonal explosion), furiously mashing the “Z” and “R” buttons to perform barrel rolls, deflecting enemy lasers, earning a high enough score to make General Pepper regret enlisting mercenaries to fight his battles for him. A huge chunk of my childhood essentially revolved around Star Fox; the appearance of its protagonist in a totally unrelated franchise (Super Smash Bros. notwithstanding) is clearly a cynical marketing ploy, calculated to appeal specifically to my generation—and I swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker. Yes, my unfortunate susceptibility to key-jangling does contradict the whole first paragraph of this review. Am I an insufferable hypocrite? Absolutely; also, shut up!

Thus, I rate The Super Mario Galaxy Movie a respectable 5/10—one point for each minute of Fox’s cumulative screen time. The rest of the film is disposable, but relatively inoffensive. The vocally enthusiastic kids in the theater certainly enjoyed the experience, which ought to count for something—though they were equally delighted by the console boot-up sound effect in the Switch 2 commercial that preceded the feature presentation (Pavlovian conditioning in action), so perhaps their judgment should be taken with a grain of salt.