1 of 5 | From left, Yoshi, Mario and Luigi star in “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” in theaters Wednesday. Photo courtesy of Nintendo and Illumination
LOS ANGELES, March 31 (UPI) — The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, in theaters Wednesday, uses deep knowledge of Nintendo lore for clever Easter eggs. Unfortunately, it lacks basic storytelling.
Princess Rosalina (voice of Brie Larson), tells her Luma children the story of Princess Peach and the plumber. So they all know about Mario (Chris Pratt) and Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) but have never contacted them, even though Peach and Rosalina are sisters.
Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) captures Rosalina to fulfill his father’s (Jack Black) evil plan, thwarted by Mario and Peach in the first animated Super Mario Bros. Movie. So, Mario, Peach, Luigi (Charlie Day), Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and even a reformed Bowser travel a galaxy full of Nintendo worlds to rescue Rosalina.
Even for a quest movie, Super Mario Galaxy has no pretense of narrative cohesion. It’s simply a series of bits, perhaps akin to levels of a game, but the whole point of a movie is to connect those levels with some story.
Peach even calls out how some characters’ backstories conveniently fit the needs of the plot, but joking about it doesn’t absolve the inconsequentiality. Mostly, conflicts are arbitrarily undone when the bit is over.
Mario and Luigi find power-ups randomly when they need to defeat a creature. That’s fine in a game where a player must strategically obtain items, but a plot needs to actually motivate those developments.
In Super Mario Galaxy, the power-ups are primarily to show Easter eggs from various games, not to tell story.
So little attention is paid to character development that those few and far between attempts are glaring. Apparently, Mario has trouble telling Peach he likes her, despite her confirmed interest.
This may be relatable to young viewers doing relationships for the first time, or still to come in the future, but there is literally no conflict between Mario and Peach. Yet the film acts like there is one.
Bowser is even messier. While living in Peach’s kingdom, he clearly still rages against his captors, but seems to truly become their ally on the quest.
Confronting Bowser with the evil son he influenced opens the possibility for Bowser to explore whether it’s too late to teach his son new lessons. Instead, the film needs bad guys for the end and the Bowsers just fit the bill.
Both Bowser Jr. and Rosalina are new characters that even the main characters don’t really know. So the film is manufacturing two relationships with presumably deep connections but the characters have spent no time together.
The rules of the entire universe are vague, too. Mario and Luigi don’t need oxygen to breathe in space, so why do they need a starship to fly them between worlds?
Like the previous animated movie, the best moments in Super Mario Galaxy evoke the gameplay of side-scrolling platform games. However, by the end, they’re running through so fast it’s hard to even get a sense of the level geography before they’ve already passed it.
The score evokes familiar Nintendo music in underground and flaming castle levels. Mario and Luigi discover Yoshi (Donald Glover) in a warp zone. A montage of Yoshi exploring New York is cute but again just a bit, separate from the thin story.
Homages to obscure deep cuts in Nintendo history, and even Illumination’s own Minions, earn their moments. It is a shame that attention was not paid to the characters or story.
Perhaps most glaring is that there is no original song in the sequel. Jack Black’s “Peaches” was nominated for an Oscar, but despite expanding the galaxy, they couldn’t even be bothered to sing another song.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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