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Flash forward to now, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie arrives as the sequel to the billion-dollar hit that instead took the complete opposite approach. With the 2023 original, lore, Easter eggs, cameos, and winks at larger Nintendo mythology and franchises were the entire backbone of the film. It proved that you could go the complete opposite way from the 1993 movie in terms of reverence and still arrive at something that didn’t work at all. It’s not that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie takes all that much of a turn from the first movie in that regard to instead become something more interesting, but it at least learns some lessons from the original, while making some brand new mistakes.
Rating: 3 out of 5
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| Visually stunning | Fractured story |
| Great music | Distracting cast & cameos |
| Uses game aesthetics for animation |
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Improves on the First Film
There are really three things that make The Super Mario Galaxy Movie not only engaging, but actually improve on the first film. The first of these is in the visual aesthetic. Like the first movie, Galaxy has that animated sheen that defines Illumination’s entire filmography, but when combined with the galactic aesthetic of the film’s story (surprise, the koopas kidnap a princess and they need to rescue her) and how that leads to a variety of new worlds and planets to visit, there’s never a moment where the movie is boring to look at. Boring to listen to? Different story.
The second improvement that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has over the first film is that it’s plain funnier. Though the first movie certainly had some chuckle-worthy moments, it was largely devoid of actual humor that didn’t amount to the lowest-common-denominator of what works in kids’ movies: Mario falls down, Toad yells in someone’s face, or someone makes an out-of-pocket joke at the wrong time. Cheapness defined its storytelling. Some of this can obviously be found in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie as well, but to its credit, there are plenty of other jokes in the film that actually work. An appearance by the antiquated Nintendo accessory R.O.B. is genuinely hilarious, while Rosalina’s Lumas get some of the best lines in the film.
The third thing that really works in favor of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is that it never attempts to outdo the viral hit from the first film, Bowser’s ballad, “Peaches.” It would have been very easy for the filmmakers to believe in their hearts that they had to either try to create something that would have the same impact. By removing the temptation to replicate that success, they’ve actually won. “Peaches” was a bright spot of that movie, and attempting to 1-Up it would have brought the film down and taken you out of the movie.
Like a lot of adaptations of other material, the 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie is bogged down with explanations of everything it introduces. There are certainly exposition dumps in the sequel, but they’re handled with deft, and that’s why it’s slightly more enjoyable to watch than the first; the sequel can just GO, and never assumes that you’re confused at all by the powers, the people, or the worlds that have arrived. The film also goes out of its way to animate some sequences in all-new ways, sometimes harkening back to specific Mario games (Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World in particular), which is a nice change of pace.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Never Quite Feels Whole
A major criticism of the first film was the replacement of the long-time Mario voice actor, Charles Martinet, with Chris Pratt for the film. It’s been a recent phenomenon in voice acting for movies where celebrities are tapped for roles so that they can then be leaned on for the social promotion of the movie itself. To their credit, it worked for the box office sales, but it still meant that every time Mario opened his mouth, you were pulled out of the film and had to consider that Star-Lord was also Mario.
The same jab could be lobbed at The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, with the casting of Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr. feeling like an attempt to make sure film nerds had a cast member to lock in on ahead of the film’s release. That said, Safdie’s work as Bowser Jr. is actually really endearing and sweet. His scenes with Jack Black, clearly the best voice performer in this entire franchise, are some of the highlights of the movie. Even Brie Larson as Rosalina brings a light and nurturing tone to the character that invites warmth to the movie as a whole.
The problem still remains though, that recognizable celebrities are voicing all these characters, and that fact is that it does remain a distraction. Even funnier, though, is that it would probably be even more noticeable if it weren’t for the fact that its story is so fractured that you realize, while watching, how little dialogue most of the characters in the movie even have. Across the film, it jumps around from the POV of various characters, from what the Mario bros. are doing, to how Peach and Toad are trying to help Rosalina, to Bowser and his son, and sometimes an update on Yoshi. With the narrative hopping around as it does, it becomes clear how little Pratt’s Mario actually talks in the film, which makes you sit in the theater and wonder why it matters that he’s the voice at all and what he got paid in what could almost certainly be accomplished in a few days.
There is, by the definition of story structure, a semblance of building on the narrative across The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, but these separations in the story make another problem clear. Each scene in the film leads to the next, but on the whole, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a film defined by sequences that feel designed to be watched on YouTube later, without the context of the rest of the film. As such, no scene overstays its welcome, but it means that nothing about the film itself really feels cohesive. It’s a movie with memorable moments that are bite-sized enough for short attention spans, and to not trigger copyright protections on YouTube when they’re ripped later and uploaded to the tune of millions of views.
At its core, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is amusing. It’s a tight 90 minutes that has a pace that doesn’t lag, and some performances that hit well above their weight. That said, it never quite feels like it’s bringing anything to the table for the Mario franchise that you haven’t already seen. On top of that, it has to lob in characters from other franchises for the sake of having Nintendo-obsessed fans do the Leo meme at the screen and not because it actually matters to the story. In the end, these qualms likely won’t matter, as the film is being used as a springboard for more billion-dollar movies that will satisfy fans for an afternoon and inspire the purchase of other video games.
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